Electric Book

I am tempted to buy an electric book. For a while, it was an urgent need. Now its a lot more relaxed. I'm not quite sure why it is, but certain types of tool advertising can make me obsessive, and knowing this, I make myself wait two weeks before I buy something based on advertising to see if I still feel that way later. It has been two weeks, and Amazon has cut the price 20% today so I may just buy a Paperwhite in the next few hours.

It was a good day on the stock market, after all, and even if Russia is only pausing its attacks on Ukraine, or did this as a test run to see all the nothing the West was willing to do, I still have my own concerns, and perhaps this is the right answer. The real question, of course, is do I really care enough to buy the books I really like so I can carry them around in a digital format, and will I gain appreciation of them sufficiently to convert my own writings into Kindle Format such that I can sell them? I don't know. As I've mentioned before, harsh review of my writings from 20 years ago leaves me pondering if they're salvageable. Too much of my work was based on shocking people with the unthinkable, but modern warfare and entertainment is all the unthinkable. Even little things like Pandering are no longer enforced laws. We live in Chaos, as lawless barbarians. Even an apocalypse would be a rather moot point. At least I'm a much better cook now.

As nice as my reading spot is, reclining in my chair, with stereo, email, and weather radar scanning so I can see the incoming storms, I am still wondering if I might be more comfortable sitting somewhere more comfortable. Possibly an overstuffed chair. Those are nice. I've read one book this way, on Dad's Kindle Fire, which he enjoys. It does well, but I think it is a bit heavy to hold in my hands. Then again, I read proper books, with paper.

Naturally, I can borrow books from the Library and I'm working my way through the full Pratchett collection. I just read Pyramids, which is about a pseudo-Egyptian culture that believes many conflicting things, and spends all its money, not on building bridges over the crocodile infested river, but on building pyramids as tombs for each successive pharaoh. This is somewhat of an irony, or rather a key point. They'd do well to spend on aqueducts too. No luck. Its not a very long novel, but it is amusing. I read something like that and wonder if perhaps I could write something like it, and if it would sell, and if that would make money, to pay for a mortgage. If I had an electric book, I could buy all 50 of Terry Pratchett's works and access them for reference whenever. Those range in price from $5-11, which becomes serious money. I suspect I'd focus on the Discworld novels I can't borrow from the library and worth reading more than once, which is a decent rule to have when buying something of non-trivial cost. Will the DRM model for ebooks collapse as we fall into pure chaos? I don't know. Its worth asking. Considering every single occupation I've tried since high school has collapsed on me, except waitering which I'm not good at, I worry that if I become a fulltime author and try to make money from it, the market will collapse like it did for musicians through copying and file trading once the data is cracked. Kinda like Bitcoin collapsed. You can't base a currency on encryption standards that can be cracked. Time wounds all heels, and encryption always gets cracked with sufficient computing power.

Apple is starting to make noises about ebooks, something that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all try, but only Amazon and Barnes and Noble have succeeded at so far. Kindle and Nook are most of the market. Amazon made a Kindle App for Google devices too, though it is somewhat ironic that a smartphone is too small, and a tablet a bit too heavy to hold up for long. A dedicated reader has 1-2 months of battery power, rather than a day or less. And while it is true most people only read for half an hour a night before bed, and this works well because in half an hour you really are ready to fall asleep, a reader that's easy on the eyes and light enough to hold up for hours, and yet fits in a shirt pocket or purse is a fine thing. I'm in favor of literature. Always have been.

When you start including fan fiction and magazines and websites, it starts getting more complicated. You start to think about color, which tends to use about 10x as much battery as e-ink. And e-ink is cool. Its cool enough I want to own something that uses it. E-ink is cool because its 20 year old cyberpunk technology that took a long time to get into devices, the usual 17 years, and is amazing technically. The solution to fanfiction is to use a hacked browser gizmo to scan the text and copy it, then once formatted, send it to Kindle or Adobe file save, which I think I can do. That makes it readable on the gizmo, the electric book. There are a few good examples of writing, some of whom have epub'd their work into Kindle. Chris Nuttall for example is a common poster on Spacebattles, and is a consistently good writer, very professional approach. Like if I'd kept at it instead of moved onto the next job. If I'd been a writer instead of gotten married. I really should work on those stories on the drawbacks of immortality.

I don't have to own a portable electric book to write for a Kindle, of course. I have the free software for that. The real question is: does it have to make sense? After more though, yes it does. Should be here Friday.