I enjoyed it. It's a solid fantasy, clearly inspired by Glen Cook, about how a decent republic might survive in a world of Dark Lord name magic without having to wait around for the White Rose to be born. The Graydon strange attractors are filed down, and they make more sense in an imaginary context anyway.
(Although I am not sure why this setting isn't more like one of M. John Harrison's chemical wastelands, given the premises. Salt is 60% chlorine by weight; oceans should be deathtraps. For that matter, the violent things you can make from mostly nitrogen are rather astonishing.)
In the Google Play Store, go to My Books, then hover over the top-right-hand corner of the book cover and click on the three dots that appear. That should get you a popup menu in which the last entry is 'download epub.'
I believe iBooks will read this format by default, if you're on a mac. Otherwise there are ways of converting it to Kindle, etc.
I purchased the book and tried the steps given here. It fails for me; it shows an annoying captcha, then either gives me *another* captcha (which, I assume, means I didn't read the previous captcha correctly) or gives me a 404 error ("The requested URL ... was not found on this server.")
Later: Ok, I got it to work by using Firefox on Mac OS X. (The UI isn't as described here, but it can be figured out.)
Not aimed at you, but: Mr Saunders, *please* consider not punishing your customers this much!
Do you by any chance have more than one Google account? That might explain that behaviour, if you purchased under one but the browser thinks you're logged in as the other.
I think Google Play is really set up for Android users -- to whom the three-dots thing is a more obvious signifier of menu.
No and yes. No I don't have more than one, but yes other members of my family use this machine occasionally. However: I had to log in to the "correct" account at the start of the process in order to see Google Play (and make my purchase). I would think that once I had done that, it should have handled the rest correctly. Perhaps Google should consider hiring someone who actually uses the internet :-P
I successfully purchased (...and read and enjoyed...) it when it came out - - but now I have absolutely NO IDEA where the hell it resides on my computer.
I bought it at Kobobooks, where you don't actually get a download option. Instead I had to install their own reader on my phone, which downloaded the book as a series of html pages, then use Sigil to create a proper ebook out of it...
If you install Kobo's free desktop app, you can download Kobo purchases to that, and they will be stored locally as unencrypted epubs. On my Mac they're found in "~/Library/Application Support/Kobo/Kobo Desktop Edition/kepub", I don't know where the Windows version puts them but it shouldn't be hard to find. The files have opaque names but you just need to add .epub to the end to make them readable.
There are a lot of non-functioning links, but Kobo and Google Play both worked for me. (I suspect the problem is that Goodreads has a standard template, and it creates links to bookstores using the ISBN even when the bookstore doesn't carry the book.)
+: cool idea, and nice evocation of Black Company feel.
-: the writing feels like "this is why God made editors" or "why self-publishing has a bad name." Struggling with "who said this line of dialogue?"[1], wondering why militia and a district? council get called Wapentake and Gerefan. I've read enough about the Anglo-Saxon kingdom to think I know what a Wapentake is but don't see the connotative advantage to using the term; Gerefan was really obscure and seems to be "king's officials, probably corrupt".
Clarity or meaning redundancy don't seem to have been authorial priorities, which is a bit funny given that a review suggests civilizational redundancy is a later theme in the book.
[1] Though still not as bad as "professionally published" Brust-Tor, who produce dialogue cascades that I *know* have lost synchronization by the end, ABABABBA style, often enough that I wonder if Brust is deliberately pissing on the reader.
I think the problem more selling than publishing. Bookview Cafe is awesome, but not all that high traffic, and a terrible choice for a new author (and I have no idea if it will even take a previously unpublished author), Smashwords is a swamp of bad with some islands of good, and both are small. They are also the only sites that universally sell DRM-free books.
OTOH, Kobo sells some DRM free books, and most of its books are at least easy (ie possible w/o advanced skillz) to download, at which point DRM-stripping is relatively easy, so even from sites that sell DRM'd books (which I only recommend buying if you possess simple tech for stripping it off, and I still always buy DRM-free options if I can), this book was a royal pain to purchase and actually download.
This was a pain to actually acquire, but well worth reading. The writing was eccentric, but I enjoyed it, the lack of strong gender markers was a welcome change (and blessedly didn't make the writing feel at all strained), and it's also a very rare and very pleasant thing to read about what is so clearly a crapsack work improving (at least locally), and seeing freedom and cooperation win out over brutal oppression - there's a distinct lack of this in much recent SF&F, although Alastair Reynolds' enjoyable, but non-awesome novel Terminal World has a similar feel. In any case, thanks for mentioning this, I doubt I would have encountered it otherwise.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-09-27 05:24 pm
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I have been wanting a copy ever since I read an early draft many years ago and couldn't take it home with me....
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https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Graydon_Saunders_The_March_North?id=MoIOAwAAQBAJ&hl=en
Buy the book. Then:
In the Google Play Store, go to My Books, then hover over the top-right-hand corner of the book cover and click on the three dots that appear. That should get you a popup menu in which the last entry is 'download epub.'
I believe iBooks will read this format by default, if you're on a mac. Otherwise there are ways of converting it to Kindle, etc.
Download fails with 404
Later: Ok, I got it to work by using Firefox on Mac OS X. (The UI isn't as described here, but it can be figured out.)
Not aimed at you, but: Mr Saunders, *please* consider not punishing your customers this much!
Re: Download fails with 404
I think Google Play is really set up for Android users -- to whom the three-dots thing is a more obvious signifier of menu.
Re: Download fails with 404
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+: cool idea, and nice evocation of Black Company feel.
-: the writing feels like "this is why God made editors" or "why self-publishing has a bad name." Struggling with "who said this line of dialogue?"[1], wondering why militia and a district? council get called Wapentake and Gerefan. I've read enough about the Anglo-Saxon kingdom to think I know what a Wapentake is but don't see the connotative advantage to using the term; Gerefan was really obscure and seems to be "king's officials, probably corrupt".
Clarity or meaning redundancy don't seem to have been authorial priorities, which is a bit funny given that a review suggests civilizational redundancy is a later theme in the book.
[1] Though still not as bad as "professionally published" Brust-Tor, who produce dialogue cascades that I *know* have lost synchronization by the end, ABABABBA style, often enough that I wonder if Brust is deliberately pissing on the reader.
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OTOH, Kobo sells some DRM free books, and most of its books are at least easy (ie possible w/o advanced skillz) to download, at which point DRM-stripping is relatively easy, so even from sites that sell DRM'd books (which I only recommend buying if you possess simple tech for stripping it off, and I still always buy DRM-free options if I can), this book was a royal pain to purchase and actually download.
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