“The Electro Legend Interviews” - Aphex Twin, Gary Numan, The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett, Vince Clarke, Kraftwerk’s WolfgangFlür, Moby, Hot Chip, Alec Empire and Ultravox’s Midge Ure all discuss their lives, their music and their ideas in this rather intriguing new ebook based on the archives of “Computer Music and Future Music” magazine.

This ebook consists of the various interviews that these musicians had with this magazine over the whole period of Electro Music, so we have Liam Howlett of Prodigy telling us about the Rave scene when they started and how they plan to keep on going…  As he says “When rave dies there are always going to be people who will still want to dance, so as long as we keep coming out with original songs we’ll still be around…”

Or as Midge Ure of Ultravox put it,  “In those early days, a lot of musicians saw synths as electronic guitars. We just started going bang-bang-bang. Suddenly, you got this blast of unearthly noise and it changed the musical landscape.”

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Tired of getting hand ache, tired fingers and other nasty symptoms from holding your ereader?  Well Wingo may have the answer, they have developed an ergonomic ereader case, well actually a Kindle case.  which is bad news for all of you who might be suffering from the strains of grasping your Kobo, Nook, Sony or other ereader – No help on the horizon for you guys yet I am sorry to say.

As with the super tough Earl ereader (Link)I wrote about a couple of days ago, this one is still in the fund raising stage.  They have a Kickstart plea running currently to raise the roughly $55 000 they need to put this device into production.

We hold our ereader badly.

The logic behind this gadget is that the way we hold our ereaders is far from good, we run a real risk (they say) of problems such as Carpal Tendon Syndrome, and less alarmingly, tired hands, fingers and wrists owing to the basic design of ereaders and the various cases on the market for them.

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This has to be the most versatile reader that anyone has thought of making yet.  Earl, an ereader designed for explorers will hit the market in a couple of months – all being well.

As you will see as you read on, this ereader will have everything built into it that any backpacker, explorer or adventurous soul could possibly wish for in one device.   It is an ereader, a GPS, a walkie talkie, a weather station, waterproof to 3 feet under water, has a touch screen that you can operate while wearing gloves, and a whole host of other functions and abilities that you might well need should you be running around in the Karakorums or the Amazon.  Though at its launch, it will only have maps in it for the Americas, other parts of the world are sure to follow.   So to start with you can happily use this one when wandering in the Rockies, Alaska or the Nevada desert.

Walkie talkie.

Using the latest FRS, GMRS and MURS transceiver you can use this for talking to others up to 20 miles away, no matter where you happen to be.

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Case Logic have produced what seems to me to be a very sensible accessory for your Kindle 3 – a waterproof cover that will protect it from spilt drinks and light rain and even allow you (with care) to read your Kindle in the bath without too much worry.

This particular cover comes with a transparent front equal to the size of your Kindle, so you can see perfectly well all the front controls of your Kindle 3 ereader, and thus with ease read and do all the things you need to do when using an ereader.

Actually pretty universal.

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I have just finished reading a rather gripping and highly enjoyable ebook, a fantasy novel by Jeff Gunzel, called “Land Of Shadows”.  This is the first in what will obviously be a whole series of ebooks around the main characters we meet in this one.  The second volume in this saga has already been published I see, so when you have finished this volume you can go straight on to the next one..  Which I for one shall be doing.

I shan’t discuss the plot of this tale in any detail, as I do not want to spoil your fun when you read it for yourself.   Suffice it to say that it is all about a very unlikely group of individuals, whose lives have been dedicated to preparing them to meet a particular challenge to the world of this story (Not our earth by the way).

With a good mix of magic, swords, and other hand weapons (no guns here) our heroes and their various enemies and helpers  battle their totally evil and unscrupulous enemies more or less from the start of this ebook to the end.

Starts with a bang.

The ebook begins with a bang, we are thrown right into the action from literally the first page, and apart from a relatively short section near the start, the action continues unabated throughout the entire ebook.   The less exciting section near the beginning is needed to introduce us to the various characters in this story and the world they inhabit, and as such is entirely justified in my view.   Some reviewers of this ebook have complained about this section, but I found it fitted well and anyhow was essential.

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I have noticed that a lot of online ebook stores have the nerve to try and charge as much as $10 each for ebook versions of books that are out of copyright, and thus to be found legally free on many honest on-line ebooks sites, so if you simply go to a site such as one or other of the two Gutenbergs you can download them perfectly legally for nothing at all – which is how it should be.

Different countries, different copyright laws:

As the majority of online ebook sites are based in the USA just now, obviously American copyright laws pertain to them, which I believe have copyright for about 70 years after the death of the author, but there are plenty of sites on line that are registered in other countries, who have much more sensible copyright laws.  In Australia for example it is 50 years, so basically anything written up to 1963 is now out of copyright in Australia and can legally be given away on sites such as Gutenberg Australia.

So it is well worth checking on the original date of publication before parting with good money for an ebook….   if it was written 50 or more years ago you can probably find it for free somewhere on the net, and the only laws you might possibly be breaking might be your own countries laws if you are unfortunate enough to live in the USA that is.

What is the point of long copyright periods?

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