Why not? Isn’t rescuing this sort of thing what modern technology is for?

This hurts my brain: a 200-page paperback book titled Kindle Paperwhite for Dummies. I’m not sure if it hurts more or less that it’s also available for the Kindle.

[Update: turns out the iPhone hotspot does not route traffic over the iPhone VPN; boo, hiss. I’ll need to rig up a wireless router behind an OpenVPN box to avoid the risk of tripping the region-detection]

The Kindle Paperwhite will not speak to a shared wireless connection hosted on my laptop. It will, however, speak to an iPhone’s built-in hotspot, and the iPhone has a VPN client compatible with HideMyAss VPN, allowing me to pretend that my shiny new second-generation Paperwhite is located in Japan and eligible to purchase and download Kindle books without violating the publishers’ geographic restrictions on ebook licensing.

With that out of the way, the standard DeDRM and KindleUnpack scripts trivially converted my new books into clean XHTML, which required about 60 lines of Perl to massage into input for Yomitori. Diffing the text of Asobi ni Iku Yo book 1 confirmed the accuracy of my new source.

Now if I can figure out the new inline footnote support, I can merge the vocabulary into the main book the way I do for the HTML output, and switch from dual PDFs to a single MOBI file. But that comes later; right now, the complete text of Miniskirt Space Pirates book 1 is waiting on my Kindles, without all the OCR errors I was wading through the last time.

Flavor Beauty (amazon):

First, let me say that I’ve been enjoying Will Shetterly‘s novels for many years, with the recently-Kindled Witch Blood and Cats Have No Lord being early examples of his fantasy worlds. The well-regarded Liavek shared world anthology is overdue for an ebook rescue as well, but I’m sure the rights are a pain to re-negotiate. One nice thing about his Kindle backlist is the pricing: $2.99. This makes it easy to buy the ones I missed and re-buy the ones that are buried on my shelves somewhere.

Midnight Girl is a short YA novel about a Perfectly Normal teenage girl who sneaks out with her best friend to solve a minor mystery, and ends up in the middle of something much bigger. It’s a light read, charming and breezy despite the occasional bloody death. I think I’d have liked it even more when I was around twelve, but it still works.

Chimera would have worked better whan I was twelve, too, but that’s because I likely wouldn’t have been repeatedly jolted out of the story by the hamfisted world-building that pins All Bad Things on libertarianism, capitalism, christianity, and gun ownership. There’s a fairly decent near-future detective/catgirl story in there somewhere, but unlike his fantasy worlds, Shetterly seems unable to keep his socialism out of his SF, resulting in a world that sounds like the fever dreams of a Daily Kos commenter. The tech is also a mishmash of Cool Stuff dropped in with no apparent thought about how it would affect society if all of these things co-existed.

[note that Chimera predates the Tea Parties, or I’m sure they’d have featured prominently among the Reasons Everything Went Wrong. I mean, with a powerful Libertarian state crushing the common people and enslaving human/animal hybrids, and a theocracy ruling Arizona, I’m sure there’d have been time for some literal teabagging.]

You’d think that a publisher based out of Berkeley, of all places, would take care with foreign names, so that when releasing, say, a translation from the Japanese (such as the newly-released The Spirit of the Sword by Nakamura (family name) Taisaburo (given name)), they wouldn’t do something silly like putting just his given name on the spine.

It’s possible that the translator confused them by consistently retaining the Japanese name order, but you’d think someone would have noticed at some point before it went to press.

So if you find yourself looking for a copy in a well-stocked book store, don’t be surprised if it’s filed under “T”. Or just use the Amazon link above…

Got a package from Amazon today, that wasn’t the one I expected this week. And wasn’t something I ordered. It had a standard receipt, with no hint of who bought it for me, or why. Equinox present, perhaps?

It’s the classic Basic Machines and How They Work, by the Naval Education and Training Program Development Center. Good stuff, so thanks to whoever.

The one I’m waiting for? 8 feet of birch veneer edging, of which I need approximately one-third of an inch.