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reamde

Pen and sword equally mighty for science fiction's Stephenson

LAS VEGAS -- It's been a double-whammy of stardom for the attendees of the 15th annual Black Hat USA conference. Many people here suffered a line more commonly associated with Comic-Con or CES to get into an exclusive performance by electronica and trance legend Paul Oakenfeld at Club PURE last night.

And then this morning, they rubbed the hangover from their eyes and the ringing from their ears to listen to an on-stage conversation with noted science fiction author Neal Stephenson in the Caesar's Palace convention center.

Stephenson spoke for almost an hour with Brian Krebs, the investigative journalist who writes about security. While they ranged from his childhood influences to his books to his non-writing projects, Stephenson's face lit up as they discussed his recent Kickstarter project, "Clang." … Read more

E-book 'missing content'? Amazon must do better

It looks like Kindle e-book customers have found a digital-era hole in customer service that Amazon needs to fix.

Those readers are giving Amazon an earful after purchasing the newest novel from popular author Neal Stephenson--only to be notified cryptically that their e-book needed to be replaced because of "missing content."

The problem afflicted Stephenson's new "Reamde: A Novel," a thriller that's apparently something of a departure from his sci-fi books such as "Snow Crash" and the more nerdy intellectual fiction such as "Cryptonomicon." The problem isn't the kind of thing that would happen with a paper book.

That's of course because e-books are essentially as mutable as any other collection of digital bits. Just like a quick update can patch a new app's shortcomings, an e-book update can fix last-minute typos.

The problem here was not so much that the book changed, but rather that people didn't know what about it had changed.

"After reading over 500 pages of this great book, Amazon tells me there was 'missing content.' After a live chat and talking to 2 support people, they won't tell me what was missing, how much, what type of content, or why," seethed reader cdale77. … Read more