1.
Eric Flint
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Eric Flint is an American author, editor, and e-publisher. The majority of his works are alternate history science fiction. His works has been listed on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and he was born in 1947 in Burbank, California, Flint worked on a Ph. D. in history specializing in southern African history. A long-time leftist political activist, Flint worked as a member of the Socialist Workers Party, after winning the 1993 Writers of the Future contest, he published his first novel in 1997 and moved to full-time writing in 1999. Shortly afterwards, he became the first librarian of the Baen Free Library and he has edited the works of several classic SF authors, repackaging their short stories into collections and fix-up novels. This project has met commercial success, and has returned several out-of-print authors to print, subsequently, Flint became editor of the new Jim Baens Universe science-fiction e-zine while concurrently remaining a creative writer bringing out three to five titles per year. After the death of Jim Baen due to a stroke and after completing the contract for the tenth Grantville Gazette, as of October 2007 he lives with his wife Lucille in East Chicago, Indiana. In 2008, he donated his archive to the department of Rare Books, Flint was the author guest of honor for the 2010 NASFiC, ReConStruction. He is also participating in The Stellar Guild series published by Phoenix Pick, the series pairs bestselling authors such as Flint with lesser known authors in science fiction and fantasy to help provide additional visibility to them. One early goal was to see if the release of free electronic content would increase the sales of their traditional print or electronic editions. As part of the phase, Flint has published a series of essays that in form have been part blog and part letters to the editor tracking the experiment. Financially, it seems to be working out for publisher Baen Books, usually eighty to a hundred titles are available in the Baen Free Library at any given time. In most cases, the involved are the early volumes in continuing series, appetite whetters. All new Baen Books can also be purchased as e-books in the same unencrypted formats as the library through Baen WebScriptions. As an added wrinkle one can purchase a collection of five bundled works in the release stage of publication at Baens. Once the bundle reaches four months from its release date in print, about half of the work is serialized. A month later, the quarter, followed by the last quarter. The last delivery contains the copyedited e-book version of the book, one can also purchase electronic Advanced Reader Copies which are not a part of the foregoing monthly bundle, but are individually available for purchase
2.
1632 series
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As of 2015, the series has five published novels propelling the main plot and over ten published novels moving several subplots and threads forward. The 1632 series began with Flints stand alone novel 1632 and it is, excepting the lead novel and the serialized e-novel The Anaconda Project, virtually all collaboratively written, including some main works with multiple co-authors. However, Flint has mentioned contracts with the publisher for at least two additional solo novels he has in planning on his website. As stated in the first Grantville Gazette and on his site,1632 occurs in the midst of the Thirty Years War. The series was continued with two collaborative works that were more or less written concurrently,1633 and an anthology called Ring of Fire. By late in 1632, the New United States-led coalition of the Confederated Principalities of Europe had become the arsenal and this leads the scheming Cardinal Richelieu, whod been previously financing him to spite and weaken the Habsburgs, to turn on the Swedes. Various books from up-time Grantville, especially books, had found avid readers amongst Europes ruling elites, changing the plans. The readers, not understanding the nature of events, often believe that these histories give them a strong idea of how they can guide events in a different direction. Richelieu forms an alliance, the League of Ostend, to oppose the New United States, Gustavus expeditionary army. After the first book, the series begins multiple plot lines or story threads reflecting this independence of action by a multitude of characters, the sequel 1633 spreads the Americans out geographically over Central Europe. Next, the novel 1634, The Galileo Affair, and the first of the called the Grantville Gazettes introduced new strong characters. The former begins what is called the South European thread, and some of the stories in the latter,1632 plot threads refers to the overall story arcs or sequences within the 1632 series. Flint has pointed out that he thinks in terms of plot threads, but most web chatter revolves around geographical spheres of influence, locations, or where protagonists have a general effect. That some persons of that mold have existed is not disputed, the Central European thread or more correctly, the Central and Southwest Central European thread, is the main plot thread of the series. Bavaria proper, Switzerland, Austria, Bohemia, and points easterly, Novel,1634, The Ram Rebellion with Virginia DeMarce, crafted as a collection of related key developmental events. Novel,1634, The Baltic War with David Weber, the main thread novel sequel to 1633. Novel,1634, The Bavarian Crisis with Virginia DeMarce, chronological sequel to 1632, the main characters are, in part, Lackeys The Stone Family, combined with Flints Sharon Nichols and Larry Mazzare. Novel,1634, The Galileo Affair with Andrew Dennis Novel,1635, The Cannon Law, Novel,1635, The Papal Stakes with Charles E. Gannon, sequel to The Cannon Law
3.
Alternate history
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Alternate history or alternative history, sometimes abbreviated as AH, is a genre of fiction consisting of stories in which one or more historical events occur differently. These stories usually contain what if scenarios at crucial points in history, the stories are conjectural, but are sometimes based on scientific fact. Alternate history can be seen as a subgenre of fiction, science fiction, or historical fiction. Another term occasionally used for the genre is allohistory, cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another. In French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan and German, the genre of history is called uchronie / ucronia / ucronía / Uchronie. This neologism is based on the prefix ου- and the Greek χρόνος, a uchronia means literally no time. This term apparently also inspired the name of the history book list. Several genres of fiction have been misidentified as alternate history, Science fiction set in what was the future but is now the past, like Arthur C. Clarkes 2001, A Space Odyssey or George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, is not alternate history because the author did not make the choice to change the past at the time of writing, Alternate history is related to, but distinct from, counterfactual history. The earliest example of history is found in Livys Ab Urbe Condita Libri. Livy concluded that the Romans would likely have defeated Alexander, another example is Joanot Martorells 1490 epic romance Tirant lo Blanch, which was written when the loss of Constantinople to the Turks was still a recent and traumatic memory for Christian Europe. It tells the story of the knight Tirant the White from Brittany who travels to the remnants of the Byzantine Empire. He becomes a Megaduke and commander of its armies and manages to fight off the invading Ottoman armies of Mehmet II and he saves the city from Islamic conquest, and even chases the Turks deeper into lands they had previously conquered. In the English language, the first known complete alternate history is Nathaniel Hawthornes short story P. s Correspondence, the first novel-length alternate history in English would seem to be Castello Holfords Aristopia. While not as nationalistic as Louis Geoffroys Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812–1823, in Aristopia, the earliest settlers in Virginia discover a reef made of solid gold and are able to build a Utopian society in North America. A number of alternate history stories and novels appeared in the late 19th, in 1931, British historian Sir John Squire collected a series of essays from some of the leading historians of the period for his anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise. In this work, scholars from major universities turned their attention to questions as If the Moors in Spain Had Won. The essays range from serious scholarly efforts to Hendrik Willem van Loons fanciful, among the authors included were Hilaire Belloc, André Maurois, and Winston Churchill
4.
Baen Books
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Baen Books is an American publishing house for science fiction and fantasy. In science fiction, it emphasizes space opera, hard science fiction, the company was established in 1983 by science fiction publisher and editor Jim Baen. After his death in 2006, he was succeeded as publisher by long-time executive editor Toni Weisskopf, Baen Books was founded in 1983 out of a negotiated agreement between Jim Baen and Simon & Schuster. Simon & Schuster was undergoing massive reorganization and wanted to hire Baen to head, in 2005, Baen moved up to the eighth position in the total books published with 72 books published. Initially, the company invested resources in Baens Bar, its community service that provides a forum for customers, authors and editors to interact. In the early 2000s, a blogger wrote, Like every other publisher, but several of his authors and fan friends convinced him to put a chat client on his site. Since he was interested, and since several of those authors were very Internet savvy, the chat client grew into an incredibly vibrant community called Baens Bar. Beginning in mid-1999, Baen emphasized electronic publishing and Internet-focused promotions for its publications, the discussions on Baens bar convinced him to do so. Baen and his successors believe that DRM does more harm than good to a publisher, in addition to selling individual titles in electronic format, Baen has distributed serialized e-book versions of new books at reduced prices in monthly bundles. Originally called Webscriptions, these Monthly Baen Bundles are scheduled three months in advance of print publication, Webscription. net was implemented by Baens preferred website expert, Arnold Bailey, who also sold e-books for other publishers. At the start of 2012, the Webscription. net website was redesigned, renamed to Baen Ebooks, despite the new name, Baen Ebooks continues to sell e-books for other publishers, notably science fiction genre rival Night Shade Books. Baens standard setup is based on monthly bundles, each month, whichever books Baen has coming out in paper are bundled put together in a fixed price bundle regardless of a number of books. The Monthly Baen Bundles are released in installments beginning three months prior to physical publication, the first installment, released three months prior to paper publication includes roughly a half of every book in the bundle, with some books usually included in their entirety. The first two installments are available only as HTML, while the last includes all formats supported. Each bundle can only be bought until the 15th of the prior to official print publication. Another avenue for distribution that Baen uses for some of its new titles is the offering of electronic advance reader copies, or eARCs 3–5 months prior to actual publication. Marketed as a product for the fans who absolutely positively have to read it now, they are priced at $15 per single title. What it means is that some authors can get paid as many as three times for the book, the eARC, part of the monthly bundle
5.
Paperback
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A paperback is a type of book characterized by a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardcover or hardback books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, inexpensive books bound in paper have existed since at least the 19th century in such forms as pamphlets, yellowbacks, dime novels, and airport novels. Modern paperbacks can be differentiated by size, in the US there are mass-market paperbacks and larger, more durable trade paperbacks. In the UK, there are A-format, B-format, and the largest C-format sizes, Paperback editions of books are issued when a publisher decides to release a book in a low-cost format. Cheaper, lower quality paper, glued bindings, and the lack of a cover may contribute to the lower cost of paperbacks. Paperbacks can be the medium when a book is not expected to be a major seller or where the publisher wishes to release a book without putting forth a large investment. Examples include many novels, and newer editions or reprintings of older books, first editions of many modern books, especially genre fiction, are issued in paperback. Best-selling books, on the hand, may maintain sales in hardcover for an extended period in order to reap the greater profits that the hardcovers provide. These paper bound volumes were offered for sale at a fraction of the historic cost of a book, the Routledges Railway Library series of paperbacks remained in print until 1898, and offered the traveling public 1,277 unique titles. The German-language market also supported examples of cheap books, Bernhard Tauchnitz started the Collection of British. These inexpensive, paperbound editions, a precursor to mass-market paperbacks. Reclam published Shakespeare in this format from October 1857 and went on to pioneer the mass-market paper-bound Universal-Bibliothek series from 10 November 1867, the German publisher Albatross Books revised the 20th-century mass-market paperback format in 1931, but the approach of World War II cut the experiment short. The first released book on Penguins 1935 list was André Maurois Ariel, Lane intended to produce inexpensive books. He purchased paperback rights from publishers, ordered large print runs to keep prices low. Booksellers were initially reluctant to buy his books, but when Woolworths placed a large order, after that initial success, booksellers showed more willingness to stock paperbacks, and the name Penguin became closely associated with the word paperback. In 1939, Robert de Graaf issued a similar line in the United States, the term pocket book became synonymous with paperback in English-speaking North America. In French, the term livre de poche was used and is still in use today, de Graaf, like Lane, negotiated paperback rights from other publishers, and produced many runs. His practices contrasted with those of Lane by his adoption of illustrated covers aimed at the North American market, in order to reach an even broader market than Lane, he used distribution networks of newspapers and magazines, which had a lengthy history of being aimed at mass audiences
6.
E-book
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An electronic book is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Although sometimes defined as a version of a printed book. Commercially produced and sold e-books are usually intended to be read on dedicated e-reader devices, however, almost any sophisticated computer device that features a controllable viewing screen can also be used to read e-books, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones. In the 2000s, there was a trend of print and e-book sales moving to the Internet, where readers buy traditional paper books and e-books on websites using e-commerce systems. With e-books, users can browse through online, and then when they select and order titles. At the start of 2012 in the U. S. more e-books were published online than were distributed in hardcover, the main reasons that people are buying e-books online are due to possibly lower prices, increased comfort and a larger selection of titles. With e-books, lectronic bookmarks make referencing easier, and e-book readers may allow the user to annotate pages, although fiction and non-fiction books come in e-book formats, technical material is especially suited for e-book delivery because it can be searched for keywords. In addition, for programming books, code examples can be copied, E-book reading is increasing in the U. S. by 2014, 28% of adults had read an e-book, compared to 23% in 2013. This is increasing, because by 2014 50% of American adults had an e-reader or a tablet, E-books are also referred to as ebooks, eBooks, e-Books, e-journals, e-editions or as digital books. The devices that are designed specifically for reading e-books are called e-readers, the idea of an e-reader that would enable a reader to view books on a screen came to Bob Brown after watching his first talkie. In 1930, he wrote a book on this idea and titled it The Readies, although Brown came up with the idea intellectually in the 1930s, early commercial e-readers did not follow his model. Schuessler relates it to a DJ spinning bits of old songs to create a beat or a new song as opposed to just a remix of a familiar song. The inventor of the first e-book is not widely agreed upon and her idea behind the device was to decrease the number of books that her pupils carried to school. The first e-book may be the Index Thomisticus, a heavily annotated electronic index to the works of Thomas Aquinas, prepared by Roberto Busa beginning in 1949, although originally stored on a single computer, a distributable CD-ROM version appeared in 1989. In 2005, the Index was published online, augment ran on specialized hardware, while FRESS ran on IBM mainframes. All these systems also provided extensive hyperlinking, graphics, and other capabilities, van Dam is generally thought to have coined the term electronic book, and it was established enough to use in an article title by 1985. FRESS was used for reading extensive primary texts online, as well as for annotation and online discussions in several courses, browns faculty made extensive use of FRESS, for example the philosopher Roderick Chisholm used it to produce several of his books. Thus in the Preface to Person and Object he writes The book would not have been completed without the epoch-making File Retrieval, despite the extensive earlier history, several publications report Michael S. Hart as the inventor of the e-book
7.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
