What happens when fire-breathing dragons battle Stukas for aerial supremacy over a battlefield? Can an earth wizard’s magic defeat a panzer? Krish, a farmhand turned mercenary, witnesses this and much more as he confronts the Necromancer King’s new war machines resurrected from before the First Civilization’s fall. Worse yet, a wounded prince tasks Krish to find the fabled Colonel of the West and barter the royal family’s malevolent Blood-Sword for a weapon to thwart the Necromancer King’s victory. Flank Hawk is set in the distant future where magic exists and brutish ogres are more than a child’s nightmare.
“Flank Hawk’s characters skewer you on page one, then the plot kicks your butt! Grab hold! Ervin’s got the magic!”
– C. Dean Andersson, author of the Bloodsong Trilogy
Author Website
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Slashdot has an interesting post on a patent filed by Amazon that describes a technique for digitally watermarking passages of text. It does this by substituting one or more key words within the text with synonyms for those words. These synonyms are stored in a database and each key word may have more than one synonym. Using this technique it’s possible to deliver a unique version of the text to each requester. Not only that, the specific combination of synonyms used can be stored in a database against the requester’s details. If that particular except is ever misused or illegally distributed it will be possible to track it back to the original requester. The beauty of this technique is the reader is none the wiser that the text has been modified from the original. It’s the textual equivalent to watermarking a digital image by subtly adjusting the colour levels of a small proportion of their pixels.
The main purpose of the patent seems to be uniquely identifying excerpts of text from a copyrighted work that is served digitally to a number of readers. It also specifically describes how synonym substitution would make it difficult to automatically reconstitute an entire document by successively requesting adjacent excerpts. The patent states that if the overlapping region of two adjacent excerpts was populated with different synonyms then this would confuse the program trying to stitch the two back together. I seriously doubt this would work in practice. The number of synonym substitutions required to confuse a program with even some basic smarts would make the original work unrecognisable. You’ve only got to look at how well photo stitching software can line up two images to know that matching two excerpts of adjacent text is going to be a trivial task, with or without synonym substitution.
What is exciting to me about this technology is it could be used as a very effective and unobtrusive form of social DRM for ebooks. Because the identifying information is hidden within the text itself, the text can be packaged in an open format such as ePub or HTML. The reader is free to store it on any device, print it, use text to speech to speak it aloud and save it to any private storage medium. Because it contains unique information that identifies the reader they are discouraged from sharing it with others.
There are however a couple of downsides to this technique. The first thing I thought when reading about the technique was ‘An author’s choice of words is sacred. I don’t want to read a book that’s been tampered with, no matter how subtly’. After thinking about it some more, I believe I could live with it for most titles. The immediate exception that springs to mind would be something like Shakespeare. Not only is his prose so clever and precise, it’s so well known and widely quoted, that to tamper with it would be an abomination. The longer the work, the better the technique would work as there is more information in which to hide your identifying information. In a large work, only a very tiny fraction of words would need to be changed.
The other downside to this technique is it seems like it would be very easy to circumvent. To identify the words that have been substituted with synonyms, you would just need to download two copies from separate accounts and use a textual diff to see which words have changed. No doubt only a small percentage of the entire set of substituted words would vary between two copies. However you could imagine a group of people getting together to download and compare a large number of copies. Once you know the majority of words that have been substituted, you could substitute your own synonyms, obliterating the identity of the original requester(s) and perhaps inadvertently assuming the identity of some other luckless customer.
Nevertheless it’s an interesting idea that I hadn’t heard of before. I’d be interested to hear what authors have to say about having their work modified.
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DAISY is an XML-based e-book format created by the DAISY international consortium of libraries for people with print disabilities. DAISY implementations have focused on two main types: audio ebooks (digital talking books) and text ebooks. DAISY text ebooks are similar in many ways to the ePub format. DAISY uses the DTBook XML document type which provides a rich set of tags for marking up various elements of a book, making it easy to navigate and accurately convert to spoken audio using text to speech.
I’ve been working on ebook to audiobook conversion for the next release of Text2Go,which is now in beta. I’ve provided support for ePub and was hoping to include support for DAISY DTBook. The DAISY specification is freely available and there is a sample ebook in DTBook format. I’ve created a simple DTBook reader which will read the sample DTBook available. However I need to test this with a large range of DTBooks from multiple sources before I can be confident that I’ve provided a bullet-proof implementation.
This is where I’ve run into problems. I just can’t seem to find a good source of ebooks in DTBook format. Are there free or even paid sources of such ebooks on the Internet or are they only available through libraries or sites catering to the visually impaired? Perhaps I haven’t hit on the right keywords to use in Google? It’s a real shame as I would like to provide first class support for the DAISY DTBook format as it’s been designed specifically for text to speech applications.
If you’ve discovered any good sources of DAISY ebooks, please let me know. Thanks in advance.
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Years ago, international aid worker Frank Bowen lost his wife Liz, when she went missing in the wilds of Belize. The constables of San Ignacio never found a trace. Years later, on a pilgrimage to her remote ‘grave,’ Frank loses his way and his world.
Frank, the ultimate “Doctor Without Borders,” is ambushed visiting Liz’s wife’s makeshift memorial in the Chiqibul wilderness of western Belize. But… by whom? Bandits? Drug runners? Maoist rebels?
Forced into an illuminating exile that rekindles hope for Liz’s survival, Frank wanders the frontiers and backroads of a war zone in search of her.
At the same time, a band of militia scouts on their way home from the enemy frontier become stranded in a small American town where they discover a plot to open Earth to their enemies.
The scouts’ attempt to foil this plan receives Frank’s oblivious and inadvertent assistance during his quest for Liz, whose trail gets warmer the farther Frank travels into “Gi”.
More info at: http://asparrow.weebly.com
$1.99 but FREE with Coupon Code: ND66P (until Nov 18, ‘09)
497 pages
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When suffering grows too great, when injustice becomes overwhelming, when evil stomps with too heavy a boot, in those moments, justice and vengence become one. For those moments, the Skullmask lives. In appearance a simple leather mask in the shape of a skull, Skullmask gives its wearer the memories, skills, and physical ability of all of those who wore it before. The Skullmask demands only one thing–vengence.
Author Teel James Glenn creates a powerful adventure harkening back to the days of pulp fiction and ‘Weird Tales.’ Skullmask is priced at $3.99, but between now and November 12, it’s only $1.00.
Skullmask–its wearers can be killed, but Skullmask only gets stronger
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In a fit of temper, Gracelyn’s only sister curses her so she’s forgotten the moment anyone turns away from her. Only one thing, an exact moment, can break the curse, but after years of failed attempts, she is forced to accept living her life completely alone.
Her world is calm and predictable until one Halloween night…
one costume party…
and one masquerading man changes everything.
Video Trailer
Author Website
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Craig Edmonds, a successful stockbroker, reports the disappearance of his wife, Kirsty. What starts as a typical missing person’s case soon evolves into a full-blown homicide investigation when forensics uncover blood traces and dark-blonde hairs in the boot of the missing woman’s car. Added to this, is Craig’s adulterous affair with the victim’s younger sister, Narelle Croswell, compounded further by a recently acquired $1,000,000 insurance policy on his wife’s life. He is charged with murder but, with no body and only circumstantial evidence, he walks free when two trials resulting in hung juries fail to convict him.
Ten years later, Jacinta Deller, a newspaper journalist is retrenched. Working on a freelance story about missing persons, she comes across the all but forgotten Edmonds case. When she discovers her boyfriend, Brett Rhodes, works with Narelle Croswell, who is not only the victim’s sister but is now married to the prime suspect, her sister’s husband, she thinks she has found the perfect angle for her article. Instead, her life is turned upside down, as befriending the woman, she becomes embroiled in a warped game of delusion and murder.
THIN BLOOD is a suspense-filled mystery in a contemporary Australian setting. The novel also touches on deeper themes, like family and trust: protagonist Jacinta Deller discovers that blood is not always thicker than water, and sometimes the people you should count on are not the ones who are tied to you by blood or by marriage.
Vicki Tyley author website
$3.97 (FREE until 15 Nov ‘09 - enter code BV68V after adding book to cart.)
237 pages
(3 votes, average: 8 out of 10)
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It was interesting to read over at TeleRead.org that the Los Angeles Public Library won’t buy e-books in a format for Adobe Digital Editions until ADE software supports text to speech, according to Library Journal.
This is a good decision by the LA Public Library as there are a number of thorny issues surrounding ePub, DRM and Text to Speech.
The first is that DRM protection and text to speech do not sit well together. Why? Because as soon as you offer text to speech you introduce a major security vulnerability into your elaborate DRM mechanism. This is why I believe that many ebooks in PDF format are shipped with text to speech disabled. Granted, in a number of cases, the publisher may not have the audio rights to the work but I suspect the majority of the time they don’t want to subject their works to this vulnerability.
To understand the security vulnerability you have to understand a little of how the text to speech process works. The following is specific to Microsoft Windows. I’m not familiar with text to speech on Linux or MacOS but I assume they have similar mechanisms.
Microsoft Windows supports text to speech using SAPI, the Speech Application Programming Interface. This interface serves two functions. It allows any Windows application like Adobe Reader, Microsoft Excel, and my own Text2Go to pass a string of text to the API and have it converted to speech. This speech can be output directly through the PC’s speakers or saved to an audio file (in .wav or mp3 format for example) for later playback. The actual conversion is done by a computerized voice. Windows XP ships with the atrocious sounding Microsoft Sam voice. Windows Vista and Windows 7 ship with the marginally better Microsoft Anna voice. Thankfully there are a number of 3rd party voice providers who sell a huge range of high quality, natural sounding voices in multiple languages and accents. Voices can be registered through SAPI and made available to any application that wants to provide text to speech functionality. Applications can then use SAPI to discover which voices are available on their system and let the user to choose a voice to use.
This brings us to the security vulnerability introduced by text to speech. In order for an ebook to be converted to speech, the entire text must be passed through one of the installed voices. For a normal voice this is not really a problem. The text will be spoken aloud through your speakers. But what say we created our own voice that didn’t convert the text to speech but instead saved it to a file. This would give you the means of instantly creating a plain text copy of an ebook. The only downside would be you’d lose all formatting information.
Such a voice would be very easy to develop. Microsoft even provide a sample voice as part of their documentation. Applications such as Adobe Reader or Adobe Digital Editions would have no way of knowing if your voice was a genuine text to speech voice or a text to text file voice.
The only way to guard against this would be for Microsoft to introduce a certification process for all SAPI-compliant voices. Voice vendors would be required to submit their voices to Microsoft for validation. Once verified, the voices would be digitally signed to identify them as being certified and to ensure they were not later tampered with. Applications could then choose to only use these certified voices for text to speech.
If you’re thinking this is a little far fetched then you may like to know that this is precisely the process Microsoft requires Vista-compatible video drivers to go through. This was to prevent the user from installing a video driver onto their system that pipes the video output from a DRM-protected HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc directly to an unencrypted file. Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland has conducted an interesting analysis of the Microsoft Vista DRM.
Closed, proprietary systems that don’t allow you to install your own software, such as the Amazon Kindle, will be less vulnerable to this approach.
As ebooks gain in popularity it will be interesting to see if Microsoft introduce a validation system for text to speech voices. In the meantime I’m sure publishers will continue to demand control over whether their works support text to speech on a title by title basis.
Which brings us back to the lack of text to speech in Adobe Digital Editions. Even if Adobe do add text to speech support, it’s still not much use to readers if publishers persist in disabling text to speech for the majority of their titles. The LA Public Library need to insist that not only does ADE support text to speech but all supplied ebooks also have text to speech enabled.
This confusing state of affairs makes it difficult for the ebook purchaser to answer the simple question ‘Can I convert this ebook to speech?’ prior to purchase. One of the great benefits of the ePub format is that you know there are no hidden restrictions on what you can do with your ebook. It can be read on any device with an ePub compatible reader and text to speech will always be possible. However now there are ‘DRM-protected ePub ebooks’ around, once again the consumer is left needing to ask a hundred questions to determine their rights for each individual title.
The real deception here is continuing to call ‘DRM-protected ePub’ ebooks ePub. As soon as an ePub ebook is wrapped in DRM it loses all the advantages of an open standard that come with ePub. I’m sure publishers recognise that ‘DRM-protected ePub’ is quite a mouthful and the tendency will be to shorten it to ePub.
I find this muddying of terminology particularly frustrating as I near the release date for a major upgrade to Text2Go which will support converting ePub ebooks to audiobooks. I would like to be able to say in my marketing material that ‘Text2Go supports ePub ebooks’ without having to add a caveat such as ‘except those protected by DRM’. A statement such as this means nothing to people outside the industry and all of a sudden you’re having a technical discussion on ebook formats, DRM, its restrictions and why is it necessary. By the time you’ve finished, if the customer hasn’t fallen asleep or fled, they’re going to be highly confused or suspicious of ebooks.
To my mind once an ePub ebook is wrapped in DRM it should not be allowed to use the name ePub. Perhaps instead they could be referred to as eSnub - the format publishers use when snubbing the rights of readers and the format readers should snub if they know what’s good for them.
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For those interested in participating in the Text2Go ebook to audiobook beta, drop an email to markgladding at ebooksjustpublished.com and I’ll send you a prerelease copy as soon as it’s available.
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Dylan knew how demanding Preston Ashcot was with his employees, yet had no idea he placed the same demands on his sons, withholding approval and love until his definition of perfection had been realized which was impossible for any human being to achieve. He hated old man Ashcot though he never let it be known either by deeds or words for fear of losing the beloved ranch he had come to regard as his own. This new insight into old man Ashcot’s true self served only to heighten Dylan’s hatred of him. He had stripped his own son, the man that Dylan now loved, of his very soul. Dylan would do whatever he could to make Brandon feel loved, and he would try as best he could to restore his self-esteem.
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“In ancient days, when only women were warriors … ”
“When was that?”
“I don’t know. A long time ago, I suppose.”
“How long ago?”
“I have no idea. It’s not important. It’s just the way you start a story.”
“Why?”
“All stories begin like that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They just do.”
In Book I of the trilogy, Tamras, our hero, arrives in Merin’s house to begin her apprenticeship as a warrior, but her small stature causes many, including Tamras herself, to doubt that she will ever become a competent swordswoman. To make matters worse, the Lady Merin assigns her the position of companion, little more than a personal servant, to a woman who came to Merin’s house, seemingly out of nowhere, the previous winter, and this stranger wants nothing to do with Tamras.
Tamras’s journey begins with the smallest of steps. She sets aside her disappointment and performs as well as she can the humble tasks given her, and eventually she succeeds in winning the trust and then the friendship of the cantankerous warrior to whom she has been assigned.
In the first year of her journey, Tamras will make a series of choices that often seem insignificant, but they will flow from her character and from her good intentions, and they will determine her destiny.
The Music of Words
… From the title the reader would expect simply a tale of battle and blood, but this story instead surprises and mesmerizes one in its wonderful intricate weaving of words that become a delicate fabric of story and feeling. Words flow like a gentle meandering stream and one is swept up in the actual thoughts and emotions of the main character as she experiences growth and change…
Well-written, well-conceived, polished
The world-building is solid, the characters feel true… These are fantasy books, but there’s no ring of power or glowing sword of specialness; the magic, like the tone of the book, is quiet. It feels real.
Perfectly believable, yet perfectly fanciful and imaginative
…(the hero) learns much of statecraft, friendship, loyalty, and duty… mostly, she learns what she wants most in her own life… Well written, a pleasure to read. On to Book 2!
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1963, and panic over the spread of heroin addiction in London. While the Profumo and Challenor scandals are exposing the dark underbelly of postwar Britain, a teenage heroin and cocaine addict undergoes a cold turkey in a padded cell. His escape from custody triggers a chain of events which ends in murder and mayhem.
A lyrical and triumphant elegy to a seedy, vice-ridden London of the 1960s.
(7 votes, average: 9.43 out of 10)
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Zombies have invaded the U.S., but one political party is hoping to promote brotherly love. A young girl sells nice dreams for a nickel, but be sure to read the fine print. Gorillas teach kindergarten, or deliver unexpected refrigerators. Magical gypsies deliver predictions that have uncomfortable ways of coming true. People unhappy with their own lives can enjoy someone else’s past for a cheap price…but be careful of the sudden ending. In the land of the novel-writers, poets beware.
From zombies to space aliens to fortune-telling gypsies to ancient and magical statues, author Michael Kechula delivers 71 complete stories of speculative fiction. Kechula has become a leader in ‘flash fiction,’ super-short stories that contain characters, dialogue, and a complete plot, all within a very small number of words. In THE AREA 51 OPTION AND 70 MORE TALES OF SPECULATIVE FICTION, Kechula shows why he’s been so successful.
For its first month of availability (until October 18, 2009), this complete collection is available for only $1.00 directly from the publisher. After October 18, it’ll be available at its regular price of only $3.99. (Multiple eBook formats).
$3.99 (but only $1.00 until October 18)
187 pages
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