Audible Price Complaints
I have been a member of Audible.com for almost as long as the service has been running with a 8 month break in service during a billing snafu that resulted in me getting super annoyed and canceling for a while about 6 years ago.
The service used to be great(getting an audio book online when you wanted it), but customer service and ease of browsing navigation for Audible books has always been terrible.
I have always been super annoyed with their subscription plans, mostly because they can not be paused without cancelling your entire account. From my perspective, there are typically periods of time, when I don’t want the service for 2 –3 months. This usually happens for two reasons:
- I’ve read too many books and I need a break from reading for a couple months
- Audible’s site makes it so difficult to find books I want to read that I give up for a month or two.
Regardless, I have a new complaint about Audible, and this one might drive me away from the service all together. Its pricing.
They have recently started charging 2 credits (the equivalent of 2 months worth of subscription fees or $30) for the download of many unabridged books.
From my perspective, an abridged book, just isn’t worth reading. So in making this move, Audible is doubling the price of their books. Maybe making this even worse, this seems to happen on those books that I can actually find and want to read on Audible, as opposed to the masses of books that seem to clutter their system.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a book worm and read hundreds of books each year, sometimes even a thousand or more. I’m not super picky, because I can read very fast. For example, I have read the first 3 books in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer since Monday.
I had thought about listening to the fourth book, but the price got in the way.
So now, not only can I not find books on Audible, but when I do find them the price is double. 
This might just be the thing that drives me to drop the service entirely.
Son of a Witch, Las Vegas Bound, Themes, Themes WP Schmemes
It started out kind of slow compared to wicked, but finally picked up enough to be engrossing about half way through the book, I’m talking about Son of a Witch that is. I got the impression that after the author’s ten year hiatus from Wicked, it just took a while for him to get orientated in the land of Oz again, but once he was there, he was determined to make it work.
So last night I stayed up until 5 in the morning finishing the book after I finished work around 1 am.
This week, I’ve been planning out a trip to Las Vegas next week. I’m making a trek to Vegas and Laughlin actually to catch up with my business partner Joe Klein of New Media Creative. We are locking down some very interesting plans for the year. I’m also hoping to maybe stop in and see everyone in the Las Vegas meetup group again. Haven’t hung out with that crowd since Las Vegas WordCamp. Vegas has a very vibrant and strong WordPress group, and after hanging with the local Charlotte group, I’m interested to see what ideas and practices might cross pollenate.
Today, I was spending a little time catching up with some bloggers at Blogexplosion. I came across a new blogger I hadn’t met before that runs a blog called Snarke.net. Long story short, I noticed a recent tweet from them about how their current WP design wasn’t really doing it for her.
So I thought I’d jump into my favorite design platform for wordpress themes and see just how fast I could whip something together using a couple pictures from her own flickr account.
Here’s the before (or current I should say)
Here’s my 5 minute design after (I’m sure I could do better with a little guidance and feedback, but I just felt like a little random act of design kindness might help me get some focus on my next project for this evening. 
The original theme isn’t really that bad, and most of those widgets would import nicely into this them. I just kind of thought the blog needed a slightly more personal feel, but maybe that isn’t Snarkey enough. 
Snarke, whomever you are
Alternatively, if you want to try your hand at the design thing yourself, check out my theme design video at Softduit.
Coming Out of a Great Weekend
Since I worked all night last night (Sunday) I feel obliged and guilt free in talking about my weekend a little bit.
WordPress Meetup in Charlotte
Going into the weekend, I was gearing up for the Greater Charlotte Area WordPress users meetup. I founded this group and this was our first meeting. I’m happy to say that it went very very well. We had a dozen people show up out of 15 yes rsvps and that seemed pretty darn good for a Saturday and a first meetup at that.
During our meetup I provided a session on how to design a custom wordpress theme from scratch with some great software that makes it a snap to create a custom WordPress theme.
I let people see how to design wordpress themes, and used the software also as a means for helping many of the people in the meetup better understand the components that go into a typical wordpress theme, why they are there and where they come from, such as the header, footer, sidebars, content sections and more.
I got lots of video of the presentation including a screencast. I neglected unfortunately to get any pictures of the attendees. So I’m hoping a few other people grabbed some snap shots of the event.
Bible Belt Zaps Religulous DVD
That evening, I came home, rented Twilight and Religulous. I had the intention of watching Religulous first (with the kids) but the DVD would not play in our DVD player. It wasn’t a blueray issue, just a standard DVD in a standard DVD player. I was suspicious that a local might have zapped the Religulous DVD or something, but the next day when I tried it on my computer it played fine.
Twilight
So instead we watched Twilight. Twilight was a good movie, but as vampire movies go, there was no revelation. When you have heard the history and capabilities of vampires once, you’ve heard it a thousand times. Basically, this just mixed in the perspective of a moody, post goth teenage girl who developed a crush on the extra pale rebel of a vampire from the local vampire horde.
The movie probably would have been down right dull if the cinematography wasn’t excellent. Its hard to make the rainy areas of the Pacific northwest look inviting, but the movie managed to pull it off, with odd contrasts back and forth with Joshua treed settings in Phoenix.
The Lazarus Effect
The next day I finished a Frank Herbert book I’ve been reading called the Lazarus Effect. You may be more familiar with Herberts books from the Dune Series or the Dune movies. This was a pretty good book, but nothing to do with Dune. It did involve scifi and politics and the battle for scarce resources, and mutants and religion and things of that nature.
We ended the day with a cookout with some friends. The kids played with their kids, we all ate some great steaks with rice and beans and had a few beers.
It was probably the beers, but that night I got tired early and crashed around 9 pm, only to wake back up (probably after the beers had worn off) just before midnight. So I ended up working on editing the audio and video from the WordPress meetup until the kids got up in the morning to go to school.
Today Shaping up . . .
I helped one of my customers, Kensington Solutions who provides IT and business intelligence consulting services out of Atlanta, with a little assistance with their website. In the process, I helped show Randy how to use WindowsLiveWriter. Randy’s very tech savvy and picked up the program in about 30 seconds, after we got the WLW connected to his website, which I built a few months back.
In the process, I upgraded my own installation of WindowsLiveWriter. I always try and keep my installation up to date so that I can help my customers use it by providing guided tutorials or help over the phone if they ever need it for any reason.
Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card
Look if you want to read this article beware because I am going to blow the plot 8 ways from Sunday. It is really impossible to talk about this book without blowing the plot. Some stories, movies, books are just like that. Its kind of like trying to explain the classic Frik ‘n Frak joke without giving away the punch line. The punch line is the only thing that ties the story together. You have to give it if you plan on having a real discussion about it.
Now, I do not write ‘book reviews’. Its just not my thing. Never intended to do so in the past and do not intend to start now. I like to write and I like to read even more, but I do not like to write about what I read, kind of.
Consider this particular discussion less of a review of Lost Boys and more of a empathetic dialogue or maybe a commiseration with other marks that have read this book. I use the term ‘mark’ not to take anything away from the book. I use it because that kind of fits. Like the Frik ‘n Frak joke you have to experience the joke and in doing so you have to be the butt of the joke to get the full experience of the story. That is because the reader or observer actually becomes part of the story and this is not really known until the punch line is dropped.
Lost Boys was written according to the author as a response to Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery. I did not know that when I read the book, and I am glad I didn’t. It would have spoiled the book. Throughout the book boys keep disappearing from a small town, and after reading too many James Patterson novels in the 90’s, I kept expecting a showdown with a diabolical villain. It was written in response to Pet Cemetery such that the author could write a story about a boy that haunts his parents, but the boy is still pure or innocent or at least ‘not evil’.
So the author walks the reader through this long drawn out story. This is classic Frik n Frak stuff. The longer the story, the more twists and turns and sub plots the deeper the hook is sunk into the cheek of the reader until the author finally tires of teasing his prey along and jerks the fishing rod of the text into the air, yanks the last remaining hidden plot element and exposes the punch line
This post continues Continue reading
Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card – Right amount of Philosophy
I finished reading Children of the Mind a couple nights ago. Children of the Mind is one of the books in the Ender’s series by Orson Scott Card. This was one of those sequel books that is a must read for closure. Every now and then authors, especially those in the scifi category will write a book that wraps most things up in a nice neat bow. It may or may not be the last book in the series, but it does cap things off at the time.
You see this in the Foundation series by Asimov, the Methusaleh series from Heinlein, the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony and again in the Bio of a Space Tyrant by Piers Anthony (although I suspect that he had an end game in mind when he wrote books in the series of his universes excluding Xanth.)
This one ends a series that came together in a bit of a haphazard way, but none-the-less is a very good series. The thing that kind of makes this series capping book something equivalent to a classic is the fact that not only does it wrap up character plot line issues well, but it also wraps up the lingering philosophical questions created through out the entire series up until this point.
Now personally, I like philosophy, I like debates, I savor circular logic and discussions and that goes double when you mix it up with a good story, a scifi story if possible and maybe something with a little suspense thrown in. I’ll take a good mystery or regular suspense book any day of the week too, but I do like to sink my teeth into something a little more substantial from time to time even if its fun at the same time.
I’m currently reading Plum Lucky by Janet Evanovich as I write this article. Both writers have a talent for dialogue, even though they developed their skills in different ways. . . . kind of
Next up on my plate after I finish Plum Lucky is The Lazarus Effect by Frank Herbert & Bill Ranson. I have not yet read the book that comes before the Lazarus Effect which is called the Jesus Incident, but I’ll probably attempt to track that down also.
Then Ender’s Shadow which is a tangential book in the Ender’s Series covering some supporting characters from the first book. Then I’ll probably read a little Dan Brown (Deception Point) after that.
Next up in my que ‘Speaker for the Dead’ by Orson Scott Card
I finished reading the twentieth anniversary edition of Ender’s Game a couple weeks ago. I followed that up with a book by Louis Black called Nothing Sacred.
Speaker for the Dead is the sequel to Ender’s Game. Ender’s Game was a very good book and I was struck by the lack of detail about the setting and the people and well everything. The book is written in a minimalist style so that the reader can project with their own imagination what things look like and how they interact with each other.
The book also plays out inside the character’s heads largely. There is some dialogue, but it is the constant ongoing self analysis of the situations the characters encounter that drive the book forward.
I learned this from the authors own comments at the end of the book. As I considered that writing style, I realized that like a Heinlein book where the character is often capable of dealing with any situation physically, or like a Asimov book or even a Piers Anthony book where the character’s are always so damn smart that they can figure something out with their intellect, Orson Scott Card emulates that style. This immediately puts him in company with some of my favorite authors.
My only criticism of his books comes in either the editing or the close of the book. In most of the books I’ve read by Orson Scott Card, I run into sections where it feels like the author gets bored with the topic or plot. That was always my perception until I read the authors notes at the end of the anniversary edition, where a few comments about the editing process helped to indicate that some of the sections of the books were cut to keep the book moving along.
Personally I feel like that was a mistake, but it could be a sign of the times. Twenty years ago, lets say before Harry Potter and the Oprah Winfrey book club, I do not think many people were reading popular books as much and reading a page volume level like they might be today.
Book sales may be down, but that could be a function of people enjoying longer books!
So maybe this is a lesson or trend for authors and editors to pick up on and exploit by encouraging authors to write longer books and not editing out all those sections that build a book almost like a Great Pyramid until you have a nice little masterpiece. Sure fewer words can convey a message and maybe even get a book moving along in a suspense book, but sometimes consumers of books, especially in Science Fiction or Fantasy, we want to experience the world, the universe, the multi verse and don’t want the experience cut short or fast forwarded.
Background on Ender’s Game Series
Ender’s Game (1985) is a science fiction novel by American author Orson Scott Card.[1] The book originated as the novelette "Ender’s Game", published in the August 1977 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.[2] Elaborating on characters and plot lines depicted in the novel, Card later wrote additional books to form the Ender’s Game series. Card released an updated version of Ender’s Game in 1991, changing some political facts to accurately reflect the times. Set in Earth’s future, the novel presents an imperiled humankind who have barely survived two conflicts with the Formics (an insectoid alien race also known as the "Buggers"). In preparation for an anticipated third invasion, an international fleet maintains a school to find and train future fleet commanders. The world’s most talented children, including the novel’s protagonist Ender Wiggin, are taken at a very young age to a training center known as the Battle School. There, teachers train them in the arts of war through increasingly difficult games including ones undertaken in zero gravity in the Battle Room where Ender’s tactical genius is revealed. Reception to the book was generally positive, though some critics have denounced Card’s perceived justification of his main character’s violent actions. Ender’s Game won the 1985 Nebula Award for best novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for best novel. Its sequels, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, A War of Gifts, and Ender in Exile, follow Ender’s subsequent travels to many different worlds in the galaxy. "Ender’s Game" has been adapted into two comic series and is planned for a video game.
Customize Your Sites theme today!
You don't need any programming experience to design Custom WordPress Themes. :)
