Kanega Ivesi Veritas ex Babylon

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Review: Tevinter Nights Ancient horrors. Marauding invaders. Powerful mages. And a world that refuses to stay fixed. Welcome to Thedas.

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The 1619 Project

The New York Times- ostensibly known as “the Paper of Record” for decades due to the select few it gave bylines to helped shape the consciousness and conscience of the United States and even sometimes the world- offered up a rarity in their neon decline into fence-straddling in the Trump Era.

The 1619 Project.

Things have been written about this subject before, but never presented on the scale…

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Review: Avatar, the Last Airbender- the Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee

Review: Avatar, the Last Airbender- the Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee

F. C. Yee’s The Rise of Kyoshi delves into the story of Kyoshi, the Earth Kingdom–born Avatar. The longest-living Avatar in this beloved world’s history, Kyoshi established the brave and respected Kyoshi Warriors, but also founded the secretive Dai Li, which led to the corruption, decline, and fall of her own nation. The first of two novels based on Kyoshi, The Rise of Kyoshi maps her journey…

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Review: Sophia, Princess among Beasts by Emily Raymond

Review: Sophia, Princess among Beasts by Emily Raymond

  A princess who has lost her mother and father finds herself in a terrifying world that urgently needs a queen.

Sophia is smart, beautiful, and accomplished, a beloved princess devoted to the people and to reading books. The kingdom is hers, until she is plunged into a nightmarish realm populated by the awful beasts she read about as a child.

The beasts are real. And so is the great army…

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Reading Progress: Pg 80/203 of The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull

Reading Progress: Pg 80/203 of The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull

  An alien ship rests over Water Island. For five years the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands have lived with the Ynaa, a race of super-advanced aliens on a research mission they will not fully disclose. They are benevolent in many ways but meet any act of aggression with disproportional wrath. This has led to a strained relationship between the Ynaa and the local Virgin Islanders and a peace…

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eReader Prestigio: Book Reader is a multi lingual, multi format text and audio books reading app. Intuitive interface in over 25 languages and an in app store library with over 50,000 text (for children and adults) books and Text-To-Speech (read along) functionality.

☆ Prestigio ebooks reader is cool – book and text reading never been simpler – you can read text files in multiple formats including epub, html, fb2, fb2.zip, txt, pdf, mobi, epub3, djvu and multiple other text and audio book formats.

☆ Tired of reading? Switch on Text-To-Speech and let the application read the text book file for you! Kids books read along – let us read the best bed time stories for you.

☆ Personalize your reading: ✔ Material Design and simple navigation – its cool ✔ Multiple Shelf Themes and in book backgrounds (add your own) ✔ Scan library for specific file and text book formats ✔ Inbuilt dictionary with Color Dict ✔ Text-To-Speech for reading books aloud in multiple languages ✔ In-App Store best books in epub & fb2 formats ✔ Home screen, Recent books, In book Menu, Android Home Widget ✔ Multiple fonts, sizes and styles for best and cool reading ✔ Night mode ✔ Books Collection – create, edit and store your books, organized by desired criteria (genre, author, added time or series) and view them in covers or list views ✔ File Manager – easily find your ebook or text file and set of enjoying reading your stories ✔ Synchronize your books and text files from cloud services such as Google Drive, One Drive & Dropbox directly into books collections

☆ Create ebooks My Prestigio account to ✔ Synchronize books between devices library (only synchronize text files where you left off, not full library) ✔ Download free books (adult and children) and texts from In-App ereader book store ✔ Buy new books from in-app ereader book store ✔ Keep downloaded books in the Prestigio Cloud ✔ Create wish lists ✔ Book Purchase Vouchers

☆ Smart ebooks search function on your device ✔ Scan your library to quickly find text files and books

☆ Multiple book formats support ereader supports the following ebooks formats: ✔ Text files: epub, djvu, html, fb2, fb2.zip, txt, pdf, mobi, epub3 ✔ Audio books stories & video files in books

☆ Multi lingual User Interface Support 25 Interface languages supported and growing: English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Belorussian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Kazakh

☆ Online epub book store ✔ Over 50,000 books – start reading and enjoying your stories ✔ Just two click book purchase with ereader vouchers ✔ Discover best and cool book releases, but also best free children & adult books and texts

This covers the Premium edition.

After installating, you get the usual Data Mining requests.  You can skip these- they’re unnecessary for the app to function.

This one’s important, though.  lol  Just choose where you want the app to scan for books.

As indicated in the text, Prestigio lets you use a wide range of formats; pretty much every available one- except cbr/cbz.  So you can’t read comics unless they’re pdf.  But it does do mp3!!!  Yep- you can play your music files through it!

You can change the color scheme of the layout, if you like.

More importantly, the Main Page layout has several options to choose from, making it pretty easy to search your files by Author, Title, Series or Date Added.

The real fun starts once you begin reading.  The range of bells & whistles available to you make this a snap.  From the jump you can change the fonts, formatting, size, margins, navigation, animations, etc.  And yeah, there’s also a generic audio reader if you’re interested.

While reading you can view a popup screen on the book’s info- blurb, tags and such.  You can also bookmark, highlight, search text- all the usual good stuff.

eReader Prestigio Premium is a great app!  It’s fully functional, feature rich, easy to use & navigate and does nearly everything you want/need it to plus a couple you don’t expect. This one’s a keeper.

4.5/5 stars.

eReader App Review: Prestigio eReader Prestigio: Book Reader is a multi lingual, multi format text and audio books reading app. Intuitive interface in over 25 languages and an in app store library with over 50,000 text (for children and adults) books and Text-To-Speech (read along) functionality.

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‘Batwoman’ Trailer Review — The 17 Waverly Podcast The first trailer for the latest installment in the Arrowverse, Batwoman, just dropped! Let’s talk! Congratulations: First of all, before even getting into the meat of the trailer, I want to give a huge congratulations to the CW and to Ruby Rose. This is a live-action comic book series with a (unapologetic) gay lead. Batwoman’s there, […] via ‘Batwoman’ Trailer Review — The 17 Waverly Podcast

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Why You Should Have An Agent And How To Get One — Chris The Story Reading Ape’s Blog Originally posted on K.M. Allan: If you’ve been following my blog for the last few weeks, you’ll know I attended the KidLitVic writers conference.

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No Wasted Ink Writers Links — Chris The Story Reading Ape’s Blog Originally posted on No Wasted Ink: It is Monday and time for a new top ten writers links.

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How Amazon Destroyed Publishing — Nicholas C. Rossis In my previous post, How Amazon Destroyed Barnes & Noble, I explained how Amazon (alone) could not be held responsible for the bookstore’s troubles.

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10 Rules For Authors Promoting Books — Chris The Story Reading Ape’s Blog Originally posted on How To Ebook: BookMarketingBuzzBlog I often think, when advising authors on book publicity, that I know what they need and want to help them succeed at promoting their books.

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Wednesday's Campaign Round-Up, 6.19.19 — Steve Benen | msnbc

Wednesday’s Campaign Round-Up, 6.19.19 — Steve Benen | msnbc

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

via Wednesday’s Campaign Round-Up, 6.19.19 — Steve Benen | msnbc

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Expansion Pack: The Villain’s Journey + The Monster — Entertaining Stories Originally posted on Story Empire: Hi Gang, Craig with you again. Time for another Expansion Pack that ties in with The Hero’s Journey, also known as the Writing Monomyth.

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Bookari is a feature rich eReader app that has a lot to offer but is still lacking in key areas. This review covers the Premium version.

– Synchronized bookshelves: Switch between your phone and tablet and always find your books, reading positions, collections, tags, ratings, bookmarks, in their most recent state. – Supports Adobe and Sony DRM, allowing you to read ebooks protected against hacking – Customizable Stores section with integrated OPDS browser, and options to add links to your preferred bookstores – Supports the most common ebook formats (EPUB2, PDF) as well as interactive multi-media books (EPUB3)

FLEXIBLE EBOOK READER – Bookmark pages, highlight or underline text, add notes to a page or to a selected text – Pin the navigation panel to display your notes next to the text – Enjoy your PDFs even on smartphones thanks to the advanced PDF support, with lightning-fast vertical and horizontal scroll, Pan & Zoom

Advantages of the Premium version – Listen to your books with the vocal synthesis – Customize the display of EPUB books by creating your own themes, adjusting font, line height, colors, etc. – Find quickly all occurrences of a word in a book with the advanced search function – Create your own personalized table of contents by naming your bookmarks – Create your own tailored lexicon progressively, filled with the words you searched in the dictionary

SYNCHRONIZED BOOKSHELVES – Edit your book details in a very simple way: Title, author, language, publisher – Organize them in collections, manage their tags and find them instantly with quick access filters (tags, authors, rating…) or with the search function – Thanks to the synchronization functions, you will retrieve your organization on all your synced devices and even in the website interface of the Cloud

ADD BOOKS EASILY – Browse the preconfigured bookstores or the OPDS catalogs and websites you have added in the “My Stores” section.

– Scan all new books present on your device with the Automatic search

– Connect to your Dropbox account or navigate to a particular file with the Explorer

NOTEBOOK – Retrieve the saved definitions and the notes taken in all your books in the notebook, organize them as in the bookshelves

Importing books is pretty easy and fast, even from an SD card.  Just select the directory you want to use and you’re rolling.

But before you go any further, in these Data Mining times we live in I suggest first going into the Settings and unchecking this box.

The first issue I encountered was with the layout.  While it’s pretty, it’s not practical. Books are sorted by title in either ascending or descending order- not by folder, author or anything else.

The only workaround is to go directly to the folder you want and directly load the book into the app.  This makes no sense whatsoever.  It also doesn’t read mobi, cbr, cbz, azw or doc files.  So it’s just an epub & pdf reader.

When you open a book and tap the arrow at the bottom right corner, a quick list of available features is displayed.

At the bottom of the next screen you can see some of the other features available, including a bare bones audio feature.  Barely adequate for the epub, it’s like English spoken by Martians for pdfs.  The Display feature offers four different effects for the screen for your reading enjoyment.

The Highlight feature is standard.  Comes in different colors and annotations, and also works with the Audio Reader- you can hightlight the text you want and start listening from there… if you can tolerate it.

One handy feature is being able to check your reading progress on recently viewed books and refer to any notes you’ve made in them.

Bookari has a lot of good stuff that’s offset by what it lacks.  If you’re a strictly epub/pdf person, or don’t need much customization for your files this’ll do ok.  If not, shop around for something else.

3.5/5

eReader App Review- Bookari by Mantano Bookari is a feature rich eReader app that has a lot to offer but is still lacking in key areas.

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And now, the last.

BookCon first popped up in 2014 when the creative minds behind BEA decided to cash in on the supernova that was the YA market and separate the bulk of it from the main show. They sectioned off the wing where the Autographing tables were and pushed every small/indie YA booth over there with them.  Wheras BEA is pretty much an industry- related event, BookCon was wide open to the public.

This was most likely where the term “shitshow” first started.

While BEA attendees could travel back & forth, BookCon patrons were kept corralled on their side.  Which meant you couldn’t move, you couldn’t talk to any vendors and there was no point in going over there since every nook & cranny was filled with people who had nowhere else to go.  All lines for all drop/events/autographs were filled hours beforehand mainly because there wasn’t anything else for them to do.

As I’d explained in my first post, since my application for BEA had been rejected I signed up for BookCon.  Since it was a separate event happening after the Expo, I hadn’t given it any thought and they had to have improved things since then… right?

Well… the price was cheap.  It was only about $60 for the weekend as opposed to $300 for the 2 1/2 days of BEA, but you also get what you pay for.  Like any big event, the devil lies in the details.  Unlike BEA where only the high profile events and celebrity appearances require pre-registration, for BookCon you need to sign up (and pay) ahead of time for EVERYTHING- lectures, seminars, even the Autographing Tables!  A big reason I attended was to try to get some things I’d missed at BEA- and turned out I still didn’t.  All the stuff that’s free upon admission at BEA is treated like DLC at BookCon.  Heck, where BEA is for promoting the main reason for BookCon is to sell.  It’s more like a flea market than anything.  

First thing I noticed was that the showfloor’s been halved.  For the BEA the entire floor was available; for BookCon they cut off the side where all the indie & smaller publishers were located.

Instead of letting us all queue up on the atrium floor as we do for the BEA, were we shuffled off to the side wing- again where the Autographing Tables were usually located and behind the UnBound vendor area.  Which meant you were gonna have 4x the attendees in literally half the space.

To top that off, everyone who’d attended those panels & lectures that you had to preregister for got early access to the showfloor.  So they were already in line for drops & events that were listed to happen at right 10am when the floor opened up, which blew my morning since now I couldn’t do any of the stuff I wanted to.  Real smooth.

Did manage to pick up a couple of titles I’d missed out on at BEA.  Only thing was because of the crowd the line took over TWO HOURS to move and yeah- I missed out on two other signings because of it.  *sigh*

I did manage to snag a copy of an exclusive ARC by Melissa de la Cruz, so there’s that.

Finally, there was a particular ARC I’d wanted from Harper Collins- the Tiger Queen- that was listed to drop that afternoon, right before the close of business. Come to find out they’d given out all their copies the day before and didn’t have any left for the advertised drop that afternoon…

For me, BookCon was basically mop-up duty for the BEA.  I met some folks, had a few good conversations and managed a few things but overall… it’s literally just for people who don’t attend BEA, publishers to sell their catalog & a cash cow for the promoters. There was only one thing left for me to do after all the bullshit:

Here’s the BEA haul and the good stuff from BookCon.

BEA 2019, Pt 4- BookCon And now, the last. BookCon first popped up in 2014 when the creative minds behind BEA decided to cash in on the supernova that was the YA market and separate the bulk of it from the main show.

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Got some good stuff at this year’s BEA.  My summer is fully booked.

  BEA2019 Pt 3- The Loot Got some good stuff at this year's BEA.  My summer is fully booked.

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BEA2019 Pt 2- This & That

BEA2019 Pt 2- This & That

A few things about some of the actual author events and stuff.

Actress Lupita N’yongo has a children’s book coming out in October.  Both she & the illustrator, Vashti Harrison, did an autograph session- no interactions, no photos (they made you put your phone away before you got up to the booth even though anyone just passing by, or deliberately hanging around, took plenty of their own…

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