So I finished this story feeling that I should have liked it more than I did. It had plenty of cool ideas in it, and many were quite well executed. But... well, there was something very haphazzard about it. The feeling that a lot of different ideas were tossed into the bag with no thought or planning, just because they appealed to the author. There were a lot of threads here, but it mostly seemed like the main plot just proceeded ahead, ignoring them. I see, from looking at the thread above, that several others had the same impression.
I would have liked to know, for example, why a Japanese woman not only emigrated on her own, but also moved halfway across the US. This is commonplace nowdays, but in the 19th century this would have been quite notable. But the story treats this just as a random biographical note.
Others have commented about how the president and his thread on book publishing was not really used. Instead, it just opened unexplored possibilties. I thought, originally, that the burners were working for him - that they were a covert means to get rid of competitiors' books. But, it turned out, not only is this not the case, but it is not really necessary, as he has a strangehold on all publishing. Fair enough, but then, if paper is so expensive to the point where anyone else publishing cannot make a profit, how is this bookshop surviving? Where do they get their paper from? They certainly do not seem to have any lack of it.
Of course, a story doesn't have to answer every question. But the problem is, with the above questions and more, that it feels like the author didn't really think of it. That rather, he just invented facts about the world without thinking of their consequences.
I think this would have been a much stronger story if it had just been set in a fantasy/steampunk world, not in an alternate Earth.
But, this serious quibbling aside, I did enjoy the story. But I enjoyed it for what I would consider somewhat unsatisfactory reasons - I enjoyed it because of what it was *about*, not because of the quality of the writing or the storytelling.
A note on the reading - I agree that it was not one of the best EA readings. But, as was pointed out elsewhere, readers are volunteers and are not getting paid. Therefore, we should not expect anything better. I wish EA podcasts would pay their readers. But until they do, I think it behooves us to maintain out expectations low (of course, that doesn't mean we should give feedback on it, but the tone of the feedback should remember that, technically, we are to expect an amatuer-level reader).
Oh, and one thing I want to comment on:
Oh, and one more thing:
In the story, when they were trying to figure out why the Hornby book didn't act of its own volition when threatened, the explanation for that did not seem self-consistent within the story. They guessed that it was because its contents were not creative, that the entity could not be creative. But the origami birds, which had no story on them, just the words themselves, were able to act of their own volition, so this hypothesis violated their own rules.
Actually, this was established by the beginning of the story - the origami of Hitomi and her grandfather was true art, based on creativity rather than following a template. For the books, the creativity the magic needed was in the contents, in the orgiami, it was in the construction.
The fact that, even though the story spent a chunk of time explaining the role of creativity in origami and creativity in writing, this was not obvious to everyone, is, in my indication, an example of how the story failed to deliver part of what it was attempting.