I’ve been ensconced in Neal Stephenson’s “REAMDE” for a bit over a week now. It’s a contemporary techno-thriller that deals with MMORPGs, viruses, international terrorism, espionage and Canada. Of course, as a Stephenson novel, it strays far from its main plot and hits on a hundred different fascinating tangents.

That being said, this book is an exercise in pushing the limits of my emotional response to its two extremes: indescribable joy/amazement/thrill, and almost mind-numbing boredom. Of Stephenson novels I’ve read, this is only the second time I’ve experienced this. “The Baroque Cycle” also had periods of boredom, most likely brought on by discussions of 17th century economics, politics or theology. REAMDE does sometime fall into a gratefully-short sprint of semi-boring happenings. But this is punctuated by amazingly awesome, action-filled sections that propel the story at supersonic speeds.

As is common with Stephenson novels, it’s hard to describe the novel in a sentence or two. At least, without spoiling the entire story. So I won’t try to. I will mention that there are quite a few overt references to Stephenson’s earlier work, like “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon”. I giggle every time I notice one of these little gems.

The only other thing I’ll say is that if you’ve any interest in computer gaming (MMORPG experience is helpful, but not a requirement: I have never played WoW or anything of the sort), action thrillers, espionage, info-dumps or just good writing, REAMDE is more than capable of holding your interest.

A few curious excerpts (with spoilers removed minimized but still present) from the novel. These are only from the last two hundred pages or so, or since the last time my book crashed. A bit more on that later.

Except for the part about [SPOILER], this was the best vacation Richard had had in ten years. The only vacation, in truth. He had never understood vacations, never really taken them. But sometimes he talked to people who did understand and take them, and the story they seemed to tell had something to do with getting away from one’s normal day-to-day concerns, putting all that stuff out of one’s mind for a while, and going somewhere new and having experiences. Experiences that were somehow more pure and raw and true – the way small children experienced things – precisely because they were non sequiturs, complete departures from the flow of ordinary life.

Which Richard was totally incapable of, normally. Looking back, he could see that the majority of his breakups with [women] had occurred in conjunction with attempts to go on vacation. He had never gone on vacation in any place that did not have high-speed Internet. Even the private jet in which he flew to those vacation sites had its own always-on Net connection. This probably qualified him as a serious head case, but he liked nothing more than to sit on a beach underneath a palm frond cabana in Bali, stripped to the waist, sipping an exotic drink from a coconut shell, watching waves roll in from a blue ocean, while wondering around [his company's MMORPG] via the computer on his lap, firing off memos and bug reports to his technical staff. He could think of nothing more relaxing.

Except for what he was doing now. If only the bad parts of it could be done away with. He was seriously thinking that, if he survived this, he might try to launch a new venture: a vacation services provider for wealthy, hardworking people that would work by showing up at their homes without warning and abducting them.

I’d love to add some more, but… ready for another rant on e-books?

My Sony Reader – PRS-500, to be exact, the first of the line and one of the earliest “true” e-ink consumer ebook readers – has an annoying tendency to crash every so often, and to take the history of the past few weeks with it. Like the history of the books I’ve read and the bookmarks I’ve placed. In the case of Stephenson work, that’s about a bookmark every few pages.

Last time the Reader crashed, I was apparently on page 520, out of 920. So that means that all those little segments that I wanted to mark as interesting in the first 520 pages of the book… all those pointers to all those interesting tidbits are now lost to oblivion. How wonderful.

I’m pre-ordering the Kindle Touch right now. Fuck this shit, I’m tired of my Reader not holding much of a charge and deleting information that I consider important. It’s time for an upgrade, anyway.

I would have loved to add some more quotes to this post, if not for the fact that (a) my bookmarks have been erased and (b) I got a headache typing in the above quote.

So, the mini-rant on e-books: copy-pasting. You can’t do it! (At least with the Sony Reader.) The text is there, I can see it, I can read it, I can transcribe it, I can even highlight and add notes to it. But I can’t. Fucking. Copy it.

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that Sony and the publishers were having a laugh, that they were making an ironic reference to the Wooden Table “meme”: to get the digital text that already exists on my computer, I have to read it and type it up in notepad, or take a screenshot and run OCR on it. It’s a joke, right? I mean, do the publishers want me to crack the DRM on the book as soon as I download it? Because copy-pasting already digital text seems like an idea that anyone would want to take advantage of. Like, students, for instance. Or people that want to quote a book in their blog. Or people who want to copy-paste the entire book into a Word document, print it out, and share the entire book with their neighbor. Ummm, I mean… who the fuck would be doing that? Is that really a concern?

Apparently the publishers aren’t getting it through their heads, so I’ll type it out in bold: the people who want to steal a book, WILL. It takes 5 minutes to rip the DRM, and that includes the time to Google for that information and for a non-technical person to use it. The only thing your draconian measures are doing is pissing off the legitimate users.

Shit, because I got pissed off enough at this concept, I paused before writing the last paragraph, and it did take me 5 minutes to crack REAMDE. (As mentioned above, that’s how long it took me to find the tools online, download and use them.) It wasn’t a hassle at all. Ripping the DRM off a book is a two-step process. And it takes the same 2 steps to batch-convert a thousand books.

Fuck you, publishers. Just… fuck you.