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What are some good options for soothing books about nothing? I really enjoy the parts at the beginning of murder mysteries when they aren’t murdering yet and just spend ten pages on how they run a hotel. I could use some books that do that for the whole run.
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Jul 30, 2018 03:16
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I just realized that my great new bookshelf with important books on it has an hour or two of direct sunlight to the lower shelves in warmer months. Moving it isn’t an option. Will UV film on the window prevent damage?
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Apr 23, 2019 04:26
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chernobyl kinsman posted:have you considered curtains The timing isn’t really convenient unless I leave them shut all day long.
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Apr 23, 2019 19:49
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A long time ago, there was an announcement about Dutton having acquired the manuscripts of two unpublished novels by the incomparable Ellen Raskin: The Westing Quest and A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese. I have never heard anything more about them. Does anybody have any information at all on those two books, or what state they were in or what happened to them?
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Jun 17, 2019 23:43
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I'm wondering what options I have to restore the quality of some old audiobook mp3s that were ripped from tapes. They're no longer on sale anywhere and don't show any signs of being so, but I'd like it if there was anything that could be done to remove mild hissing and quality issues and slight variations in tone from cassette to cassette. Is this something we have the technology for yet?
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Jul 28, 2019 19:59
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regulargonzalez posted:So, you'd have to set up a batch for it which is a bit more than I've done but audacity does (or did, some years ago) have an option to sample a section of audio and remove that sample from the rest of the recording. I did this to about 20 mp3s of songs from a live show that had terrible tape hiss, just sampled a bit of the recording that was nothing but hiss and told it to remove that from the rest of the MP3. The results were way, way better than I could have expected. Yeah, I did that much a decade ago; I was just wondering if the power of Machine Learning had made any spectacular advances since then.
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Aug 8, 2019 19:40
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I'm vaguely reminded of the lovely parliament wizard in the Bartimaeus Chronicles who had all her grimoires and spellbooks taken out of their original covers and rebound so that they all had the same white exterior with her mark. Eventually her bookmakers got back at her for decades of shittiness by deliberately introducing copying errors into WARDING CIRCLE 302: DO THIS CORRECTLY TO NOT DIE.
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Aug 21, 2019 18:31
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StrixNebulosa posted:but I'll know who dunnit and that spoils the surprise Yes, but that’s an interesting experience in itself because you can observe the author laying the mystery as it happens.
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Sep 30, 2019 03:25
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Also, we're still looking for more people for the Gideon the Ninth whodunnit readalong. We'll be moving on to the second segment this Friday. Please join us for necromantic Agatha Christie in space!
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Aug 17, 2020 22:17
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I'm wondering exactly how books being "available" or "in print" on bookshop websites works. Specifically, I'm trying to get a complete set of the Amelia Peabody Emerson mysteries from Waterstones, because the British version is larger and nicer than the American one and has consistent trade dress. But only some of them were available. I asked it to notify me when the others became available, and it just notified me that #3 is back in stock (I already have #1 and #2 as well as a few others.) Is there a way to determine that probably all of them will eventually be back in stock before I start resorting to eBay? (I also kind of want to minimize the number of times I pay to ship books across the Atlantic; the failure rate is reasonably high so far.*) * although Waterstones has been really helpful about sending out replacement shipments so far, gotta say ** ** also they're actually willing to send books to America, whereas Amazon.co.uk seems to believe that a random 50% of its books can't be shipped out of the country for reasons it won't explain even if the first two books in a series are cool for some reason!!!!!!!!!
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Apr 8, 2021 03:58
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Ornamented Death posted:Unless it's a new edition with matching art that's being released over time, they're probably all in print but don't sell enough to keep constantly in stock. Will do... oh, that one actually has some copies of Sarah Caudwell's first three in stock, although it looks like Constable never got around to publishing the last one.
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Apr 9, 2021 04:41
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I guess it was probably originally a form of inferiority complex that now sticks on as a joke? It's not like there's a universally-agreed-on great British novel, either.
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Apr 9, 2021 18:52
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Carthag Tuek posted:tbh I can't remember hearing the expression used for any other nation than America. Yeah, it's the kind of thing that came up when Americans had legitimate feelings of inferiority towards Europe, culturally-speaking, instead of the whole ludicrous ego thing we do today. Other countries don't have this because they didn't suddenly come into existence and have to compete as literary snobs with cultures that had been around for a thousand years.
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Apr 9, 2021 22:31
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The next question is "why do booksellers insist on taking an order of fifteen books and mailing each one of them separately, how is that efficient?".
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Apr 13, 2021 23:44
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Very annoyed after buying a number of "new" books off AbeBooks, which are nothing like new. Like, I knew that books printed in the 90s weren't going to be new new, but I did think they'd at least be new-ish or mint-like. But they were not, and generally I'd struggle to call some of them even "very good."
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May 2, 2021 20:22
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I've been meaning to get the Penguin clothbound of this one as part of my "let's own a copy of every book we ever really enjoyed and get rid of the others" initiative.
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Jun 6, 2021 01:57
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drat, that is a pretty heavy story.
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Jun 24, 2021 02:46
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Has anybody ever being heard of the word "planchette" being used as though it were a proper noun? A mystery novel I'm reading has several references to this Ouija-like thing, and it always talks about it as though Planchette were a person, although it doesn't use a capital letter, like "he looked and saw that planchette was sitting on the table". This is so weird that it's driving me to distraction.
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Oct 10, 2021 06:24
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I'm pretty sure they mean Endless Night.
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Oct 18, 2021 06:59
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Does anybody have a favored method for reducing the file size of extremely large M4B files? I'm poking back and forth at various audio editors and I'm having a hard time meaningfully reducing a 400MB audiobook without also making it kind of tinny. I could always take the time to convert it to MP3 and split it into chapters manually, but that's such a pain.
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Dec 8, 2021 07:44
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regulargonzalez posted:I don't know anything about that format but in general, a good trick for media like this is to convert it to mono if it's in stereo. Unless it's a full voice acted audiobook with foley effects and whatnot, mono is just as good as stereo and should be significantly smaller. Yeah, that's normally my first move, but in this case I'm not having much luck doing anything at all that doesn't notably degrade sound quality, even if I'm only going from 400 MB to 200MB, which should barely do anything. Maybe just manually splitting the files into separate MP3s is my best bet, much as I don't want to (because it's work).
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Dec 9, 2021 04:13
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freebooter posted:It recognises it, but says it's not a "suitable format" to send to the device. The library books I'm getting are ACSM files... they used to have a little arrow that I'd click to extract the data (?) or convert to an EPUB (???) in the Reader software, but that no longer works. This only happened in the last few weeks so I assume it's some sort of change to how DRM works with Overdrive. ACSM is the format that you open in Adobe Digital Editions that downloads a DRM'd EPUB from them. Try downloading the latest version of ADE and opening it in that?
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Dec 9, 2021 05:39
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Rolo posted:My mom gave me the complete short story collection of Flannery O’Connor. I’ve never read her before and the internet says positive things but I wouldn’t put it past her to slip conservative boomer stuff onto my bookshelf. She also likes some really good things so I’m wondering which this is. Flannery O'Connor is extremely well-respected.
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Dec 25, 2021 23:15
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Honestly, I do feel like finding a decent copy of anything public domain is starting to get hard because none of the online retailers are cracking down on lovely transfers of Project Gutenberg TXT files with no quality control.
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Jan 9, 2022 05:34
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Maybe keeping a single thread and changing the title every month would help, as people could bookmark it and keep up with it even if they spend a lot more time reading their bookmarked threads than looking at the thread list?
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Mar 12, 2022 23:00
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For what it's worth, I really liked Living Alone, and I've used my powers to create a much better ePub than the one that's on Project Gutenberg if you ever want to do that one.
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Mar 14, 2022 06:24
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ToxicFrog posted:Please share, I grabbed it off Gutenberg but I haven't read it yet in large part because their epubs are always completely hosed and I'm already editing three other ebooks and don't have the energy to deal with another one. This'll do it.
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Mar 16, 2022 00:17
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Is there a recommended translation these days?
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May 11, 2022 03:18
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Daduzi posted:Is there an actual term for when an author's tone is out of sync with the subject they are writing about? Thinking in particular of when they very matter of factly bring up something shocking. E.g. "I woke up early that morning. A decapitated body lay on the sofa. I checked the refrigerator to see if we had milk" "Tonal dissonance."
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Aug 31, 2022 19:35
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Armauk posted:Why use Spotify when there are better audiobook players out there? What are they, incidentally?
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Sep 23, 2022 18:21
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I'll check out some of these options! The main problem with VLC is that the Android version doesn't support chapters and therefore using M4B files with it is a pain.
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Sep 23, 2022 21:43
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A friend's fantasy novel recently got a 1-star NetGalley book review that said "I really wasn't expecting a bird to turn into a witch but couldn't stop because I'm the kind of person who has to finish a chapter" (this is the first thing that happens in the book). NetGalley reviewers are kind of starting to remind me of undecided voters.
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Oct 27, 2022 22:14
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ToxicFrog posted:This is also the first thing that happens in The Night-Bird's Feather, which is excellent. I am in favour of birds turning into witches. It was in fact The Night-Bird's Feather that I was referring to.
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Oct 30, 2022 03:40
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So, I'm taking a trip to the UK and France this year, and trying to figure out exactly what steps I need to take to purchase all the Audible audiobooks that I can only buy from the UK, while I'm in the UK. Also trying to figure out which audiobooks those are, although I noticed Lud-in-the-mist, Excession, the Dirk Gently books, two mysteries by Richard Hull from the British Library, the first Wodehouse collection (but not the second for some reason), and several from John Dickson Carr. It looks like all the new Terry Pratchett audiobooks that used to be unavailable in the USA are now for sale here, although as much as I was okay with the new narrators I really can't listen to them because of how badly the footnotes murder the comic timing.
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May 18, 2023 07:17
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Enfys posted:Afaik, you cannot buy UK titles on a US account, even even in the UK (or vice versa). You need a UK account. Ah, and it doesn't care if I use a US credit card?
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May 19, 2023 20:32
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Today my contractor finally finished the set of built-in bookshelves I was looking forward to using to store my recently-finished collection of the entire World of Darkness, along with all my other RPGs. Aside from everything else, I really wanted to get all the books out of the spare bedroom so I could go in there again. The shelves broke under the weight, with the wood the pins were stuck into giving way and causing all of them to collapse onto the shelves beneath them, causing quite a bit of damage to the books. I'm extremely upset. My contractor thinks that this can be fixed by using l-shaped pins instead of plain ones, and maybe drilling some new holes, but I'm skeptical. Is this a sign that the wood just isn't strong enough? I don't know.
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Jul 30, 2023 02:17
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The pins slid out of the wood, so this morning we agreed to cut down the shelves to make space for l-shaped pins, which should have been how it was from the beginning, and I also insisted on adding a strip of wood at the back under each shelf that can be attached to the wall studs, which I hope is going to be enough. Seriously, though, a shelf this long full of Chronicles of Darkness hardbooks is gonna have something close to 100 pounds on each one, so please let me know if you think I need more.
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Jul 30, 2023 17:36
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It would be unironically wonderful if people would explain the mechanics of this in detail to give me some ammunition, because I had to spend an hour arguing this morning just to be allowed to do the wooden strip thing.
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Jul 30, 2023 18:02
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Let's see. I apologize for being discombobulated; I've been waiting on these shelves all week, and then after finally being able to start putting my books back up and getting them off the floor, they collapse on me, damaging a lot of valuable books, and on top of that my dog has been sick all day, so I am not operating on all my cylinders. Honestly, just getting confirmation that people who know a lot about books think more support is needing would probably be helpful to me. This is what the bookcase looks like right now, with the old pins taken out and replaced and the shelves awaiting being sawed down a bit to fit:  This is what the holes looked like after the shelves collapsed:  Here are the shelves lying off to the side (they're 3/4" plywood):  Here is a close-up of the holes: 
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Jul 30, 2023 19:18
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SniperWoreConverse posted:Why would the shelves have to be changed at all? They need a little bit of length shaved off to accomodate the thicker L-pegs. quote:E: those metal brackets are damaged too, one's in the wrong socket but they're all bent up These are new, so if they're damaged there's a serious problem. I agree that figuring out which ones are next to each other in the moment is harder than it looks.
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Jul 30, 2023 20:10
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