S&L Podcast - #282 - Where The Salt Roads Lead
/We check in on our reading of The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson, get some hints on the progress of the next Kingkiller Chronicle, and find another way to track author releases.
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WHAT ARE WE DRINKING?
Tom: Laguvulin 16
Veronica: Arcadia Ales IPA
QUICK BURNS
David: The movie rights to Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin have been purchased.
Greg: The Name of the Wind 10th Anniversary edition as well as some non-spoilery info on book 3
David: Goodreads is now adding a "reread" function. Until now, they'd only allow one ""date read"" per book, but now we'll be able to add multiple dates. (According to the Goodreads blog post, they're rolling out this feature, so it may not show for everyone just yet.) This will make it easier for us folks who reread a lot or do yearly reading challenges."
Martin: The Thorn of Emberlain Teaser Update on Scott Lynch's tumblr.
Mark: An interesting reading list for fans of The Man in the High Castle, the book and/or the tv show.
Atasteforbooks: A release date has been announced for the follow up trilogy to His Dark Materials! Philip Pullman shared that the first book, The Book of Dust, will be out (in the UK) on October 19, 2017!
Louie: Read Chapter One from John Scalzi's upcoming novel, The Collapsing Empire. Available March 21st.
We'll be doing March Madness for the April book again. Get your nomination in! Tournament starts March 1
BARE YOUR SWORD
Data:
On episode #280 Adam H asked about "a way of tracking upcoming releases"
from authors. You noted a few services that try. Adam had noted "Amazon
does for stuff from authors I've previously purchased, but..."
Amazon does send some emails automatically for those authors, yes. But
you can explicitly "Follow" any author on Amazon to opt-in to
notifications about all of their new releases. Search for the author,
click through to their page, hit the ""Follow"" button.
It's an automated system, so it can only be as smart as the data - but
most authors and their agents are pretty good at keeping their Amazon
data clean[*], and there is some human + machine-learned curation to
make sure that any book you get notified about really is a new one, not
just a reprint, a book by an author with the same name, etc.
Meta:
Formally I should say that although I work for Amazon, I'm not speaking
officially for them - this is just me telling you what I know.
(But in this particular case: I work on the team that runs this system,
so what I know ought to be reliable!)
[*] I dunno about that B00EYUJ8F0 guy though. I just cleaned up his
bibliography, but why someone who knows how information on the Net
stales would years ago put things like ""has written two novels"" into a
bio is beyond me. :-)
Anthony
BOOK OF THE MONTH DISCUSSION
February Pick: The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson
Recommended: A podcast history of the Haitian Revolution
ADDENDUMS
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