First up is a roundup of sci-fi publication news.

• The online version of  The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has launched the Beta version, meaning primarily that any number of entries have yet to be fleshed out with content, but the underlying structure is there. Looks great but it seems like they’re trying to reinvent the wiki format and trying to shoehorn it into something that resembles the book when it should be the reverse.
• Amazon has announced a new science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing arm called 47North. They’ve got quite a bit of content coming out in the near future featuring works with Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. Great news but I wish Amazon would ditch the DRM on it’s downloadable books the way they did with music and drop the prices of digital versions to make them more competitive with ‘real’ books.
• Vernor Vinge has released the third volume in his Zones of Thought cycle, Children of the Sky, reviewed here on Boing Boing. The first two books in the series, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, are both excellent reads. I remember picking up Fire in an airport on the way to Jamaica and being absorbed by his dense and imaginative world while sipping banana daiquiri’s on the beach.