Exciting news on the Doctor Who books front: About Time 7 has now been officially released in print form, all 463 pages worth of it (Tat Wood is the main author, with yours truly providing "Additional Material"). This is the first one to deal with the Welsh series, 2005-2006, so it covers Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant's first year. The list price was set at thirty-four dollars, so naturally Amazon has discounted it to twenty-nine dollars, about the same price that Forbidden Planet chose. Here's the basic AT blurb from the Mad Norwegian newspost: "In About Time, the whole of classic Doctor Who is examined through the lens of the real-world social and political changes — as well as ongoing developments in television production — that influenced the series in ways big and small over the course of a generation. Armed with these guidebooks, readers will be able to cast their minds back to 1975, 1982 and other years to best appreciate the series’ content and character."

In other words, examining the children's own programme which adults adore by looking at DW's place in British culture at large, as well as including all the expected guidebook material: lots of continuity details, production information, and essays about everything from the definition of a companion to the effects of mobiles on 21st century storytelling. There's a few reviews of it out already; in alphabetical order, we have Doctor Who Ratings Guide stalwart Finn Clark, Itty Bitty Writer Publications, a writer-blogger named Jessica Nelson, Phillip Sandifer, SFX, and Starburst. All of which are generally positive, which is nice.

Meanwhile, the second edition of About Time 3 (the Jon Pertwee volume) has been made available as an ebook for the Kindle and Nook. This one is more than twice the size of the original edition, with lots of updates to take the new series into account; it's on sale for twenty dollars. Mad Norwegian has also released a copy of Mags Halliday's Faction Paradox novel "Warring States" as an ebook; the author has a lovely blog post about all the extra goodies in this edition, complete with the Kindle and Nook links, and it's only five dollars. The press release for both ebooks is available on the Mad Norwegian website here.

Update: Tor has posted one of the About Time 7 essays, entitled "Was Series Two Supposed to Be Like This?" (we paired the essay with "Fear Her" in the book). In which the plans for Tennant's first series are discussed and speculated upon...