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SE Asia and Pacific shortlist for Commonwealth Writer’s prize

It’s good to see a collection of short stories on the shortlist for SE Asia and Pacific Best Book – Amanda Lohrey’s Reading Madame Bovary.

Other books I recognise are That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott and of course Lloyd Jones’s Hand Me Down World. Other Australian finalists were Stephen Orr for Time’s Long Ruin and Notorious by Roberta Lowing

Three Australians made it onto the Best First Book shortlist – The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay, Traitor by Stephen Daisley and A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill.

Last year Glenda Guest won the regional Best First Book and the overall Best First Book for Siddon Rock.

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No shh about booki.sh

Lohrey's short stories for $19 (pbook $33)

There has been some debate about the arrival of the Readings ebookstore platform Booki.sh (what’s with these internal full stops and capitalisations?). Basically I was just excited that someone was making new Australian titles available as ebooks and, as I have a Kindle and an iPad, it was fine for me – I could purchase a book and read it on my iPad.

Some of the criticism is that Bookish only works for back-lit devices, laptops, iPads, iPhones etc and you access the book you’ve bought through a web browser. It’s not designed for e-ink readers.

I must admit I have not as yet tried to read a full length novel on my iPad so I can’t attest to eyestrain etc. My hope is that there will be some kind of convergent device at some stage where you change between the two – backlit is great for colour graphics and short bursts of text (surely the future for cookbooks) while e-ink is, so far, the best for long texts.

See the whole interesting debate at Overland blog.