HN Books @HNBooksMonth

The average paperback book weights between 1 and 2 pounds and would cost 2.75 -> 3.25 in shipping for media mail in the US. In addition amazon would take 0.99.

Pulling up a few random books for example https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640/...

I see I can buy it new for about $11 although I wouldn't be surprised to pay $15 in a physical store. Selling it could get me about 10 but I would have to pay about a buck to amazon and around 3 to ship it for a net of 6.

This is 40% - 55% of original value.

Perhaps more importantly lending or giving them in person arguably gives them the same $10 worth of value. Shipping it to someone produces $10 worth of value for 3.

A book that is shared 3 times has produced $30 worth of value. A book that is shared 10 times has produced $100 worth.

An ebook that you might not be able to read in 10 years is SUBSTANTIALLY less valuable than the physical book.

Adding this value proposition back in and removing DRM that strip actual ownership both laudable goals in themselves are entirely at odds. Artificial scarcity is broken by design and unfixable.

⬐ tomnipotent

> This is 40% - 55% of original value.

How did you possibly arrive at this number with the previous logic? There's literally nothing that backs up your math.

Read Blindsight [1] by Peter Watts. A much better book, in my opinion. It's without doubt the most existentially unnerving novel about alien intelligence that I've read.

I'm not going to spoil anything, suffice to say that the object that is encountered in space is nothing like anything portrayed in science fiction before. The exploration narrative goes far beyond Clarke's Rama, and Watts poses some very interesting philosophical questions along the way.

The book has some minor narrative issues that annoyed me, but still a great read.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640

⬐ beat

Yes, already read it! I like Three Body Problem better, but Blindsight is excellent.

⬐ atombender

I find it interesting that so many like Three Body that much! I found it an extremely poorly written book. I think that in the hands of a better writer it could have worked as a Kurt Vonnegut-style satire in the vein of The Sirens of Titans. Some interesting ideas here and there, but overall very disappointing. Mind you, I haven't read the sequels, and did not feel compelled to.

⬐ beat

The sequels are where it really takes off. The Dark Forest is far more terrifying - one of the darkest SF books I've read.

I think cultural differences play into the read a lot, too. It's an intensely Chinese novel, and I'm pretty sure a lot of Americans find his perspectives on history jarring, and want something more "entertaining" and personal.

⬐ atombender

I'm not American, and there was nothing wrong to me with the book's historical perspective. What I didn't like was the lack of depth; there's barely any characterization or nuance or world-building, and it's written in this juvenile language that makes Haruki Murakami look like Proust. It's so comically bad that I was unsure at first if maybe it was supposed to be a satire and something was lost on me.

I've read subsequently that this is how a lot of Chinese fiction is written, so maybe that's just how it is.

Sounds like it might be worth reading the rest for the ideas, but there's so much else out there I want to read.

⬐ beat

It's just how Chinese fiction is. My spouse has a master's degree in Chinese pedagogy, so I've had more exposure than most to Chinese ideas and fiction.

⬐ atombender

To be fair, that doesn't make it good! :-)

I read quite a few others that have been mentioned here, but I finally read two that hard sci-fi books that should appeal to the Hacker News crowd

Permutation City: People can run simulations of themselves or entirely migrate their consciousness into computer programs, but existence is often limited to the amount of computation that you can afford, leading to slow existences that stretch time into fractions of realtime. That premise had me hooked, but the book has fantastic thought provoking plot points throughout. Highly recommended. http://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/15...

Blindsight: Amazing first alien encounter book that should be read by everyone that is a fan of the genre. Memorable cast of characters...the Vampires are really interesting. All kinds of introductory scientific concepts throughout. Entertaining and educational. http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640/r...

⬐ stuxnet79

Permutation City has a brilliant premise but I found sections of it mostly unreadable and I can't say I enjoyed it very much. Egan would have been better served presenting the content in an essay format.

Egan's more unforgiving stories are an acquired taste IMO. I started out with his short stories and found them enjoyable when there wasn't so much pretentious info-dumping and preaching. Permutation City felt like one of his harder to parse short stories stretched to the length of a novel.

Blindsight is on my Kobo right now, but after reading Permutation City I'm scared to start reading it because I don't want to reach halfway and want to chuck it like I did Permutation City.

On a more positive note, I just want to say that I liked how prescient the novel was in foretelling AWS.

⬐ birdperson

> Blindsight is on my Kobo right now, but after reading Permutation City I'm scared to start reading it because I don't want to reach halfway and want to chuck it like I did Permutation City.

I read Blindsight before Permutation City. The way he describes the situations and the way his characters are often extremely confusing. But you get used to it at some point along the way. The story line itself and the Aliens are somewhat off the left field which makes the story very interesting. I personally liked it.

Permutation City is, on the other hand, simply boring as hell. Drier than ye olde Abstract Algebra textbook.

Blindsight, a brilliant first-contact sci-fi written by a Marine Biologist that explores the Chinese Room Paradox, "Intelligence" vs "Artificial Intelligence" with brilliant characters, writing and dialogue.

Comes with a front-cover quote by Charles Stross, a popular post-singularity author (you may have read his work).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640%3...

by assuming these alien beings would react exactly how human's would

This is a tangent, but Peter Watts's brilliant novel Blindsight deals with this issue (among many others). Describing how would unfortunately ruin a key plot point.

He uploaded the whole novel to his website: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm but in my view it's more than worth getting in paper: http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640 .

⬐ outworlder

I was going to comment on Blindsight.

It is a brilliant, brilliant piece of work. Certainly, the most 'alien' lifeform description I've ever seen. Even though he draws from his background a bit, so it still bears some superficial similarity to earth lifeforms.

If you like hard sci-fi and haven't read Watts's novel Blindsight, I highly recommend it. It's the only sci-fi story I've read that has dozens of footnotes referencing real papers published in real journals. On the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, it's aggregated diamond nanorod.

The book is CC-NC-SA licensed and available for free online: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

It's also published in real paperback form: http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640/

⬐ CWuestefeld

Agreed, it's a good book -- and maybe we can help him with his legal expenses. As you said, the hard science in it is very good. And I'd add that it's done with a lot of imagination: he covers a lot of novel ground (pun intended).

I'd also recommend his book Starfish, which shows just as much imagination and almost as much hard science. However, by the second book in that trilogy (Maelstrom) there was a lot of political agenda showing through. That's not necessarily bad, but since I happen to disagree with his agenda, and I was reading it purely for pleasure, I was disinclined to finish that book or the next.