Elizabeth Gilbert on "A different way to think about creative genius" from TED

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On Blog Piracy

Imitation may make me blush in its sincere flattery, but wholesale theft of intellectual property only makes me flush with anger. In my naiveté (my previous blog had only been around for nine months), I had assumed that entries written for it might accrue some small readership and relationship between me, the writer, and you, the reader. Instead, those posts merely provided a regular source of income for a thief.

Here's a short history. In mid-April, 2009, I discovered through Wordpress ping-backs that a thief had subscribed through RSS to my blog, sucking my entries into his own. Innocently, I visited his site. It shocked me to see my own work displayed without attribution, but what disturbed me more was the advertising displayed to support the site. Worse, that site tried to install malware on my computer.

I contacted Wordpress, but since the offending site was hosted elsewhere, they wanted to but could not help. The web host insisted that I prove that the work was uniquely my own under penalty of perjury. Such a request offended me at first. I decided to close down the blog and begin anew, but not without first taking all the steps to prevent further piracy, including:

• Providing a clear copyright notice on the blog’s first page
• Restricting RSS feeds to title plus short, tantalizing blog post summaries
• Using CopyScape banners and notices
• Setting up Google alerts for my blog title and my name

And yet, after all the trouble I’ve gone to to prevent piracy, during the past days it’s occurred to me that in the end, there’s never enough protection when someone has become determined enough to steal. One must trust. It’s a foundational value. And so, a new beginning: The Author’s Way.

[If you’re interested in more on plagiarism, visit Plagiarism Today.]

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Speculating on Publishing's Future

Mike Shatzkin's article, Will You Recognize the Industry in 10 Years?, makes THE AUTHOR'S WAY think about a grander future for the "book" and for "publishing". Mr. Shatzkin, founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Co. (IdeaLog.com), describes a future for the book in which:

... media consumption will take place by people choosing from a wide variety of screen configurations, the way they have always chosen from a wide variety of printed formats. That is, you'll pick up one kind of screen/device to read a memo you're working on, another one to look at the work of your favorite photographer, and pull a rolled-up one out of your back pocket to read a book or newspaper on the subway or at the beach. And those don't include the ones on your walls for a movie, or for a piece of art.

Certainly speculating on a future of multiple screens doesn't entirely gibe with users' current disaffection with carrying a cell phone or smart phone, iPod, PDA, e-reader, compact camera, netbook, and so forth. The weight of multiple devices and the scrambled power cords and peripherals for these devices weighs us down. And the dizzying array of choices only paralyzes us further. [Barry Schwarz's The Paradox of Choice could convince us that perhaps we face an illusion of choice, as well.] Let's not envision a future in which we carry even more mobile devices.

Why not consider that this evolution will probably force people to purchase only two multi-purpose devices, as we have in computing--one fixed and and the other portable? Beyond that, there will be brands and features to select from, unless some iPod-like device innovates far ahead of the competition. How will they evolve? And what will that mean for publishing?

It seems clear that the lines are blurring among delivery systems for various media. With an iPod, for example, the consumer can now listen to music and podcasts, watch video, read books, and display photographs. Purchasing those media and manipulating them, however, takes a computer. Smart phones, with their emphasis on calls and email, continue to expand into photography, office applications, and music. But the killer, does-it-all portable appliance both shines and suffers from the small form factor. Enter the dedicated e-reader, with wireless access and rudimentary web browser (e.g., Amazon Kindle 2 or iRex digital readers, all of which have wireless capabilities). While too large to fit into a pocket, the expansion of capability appears to be only one generation away. The K2 already provides a text-to-speech (which has created quite the uproar with the Authors' Guild), access to portal-based email systems through its web browser, online purchasing through Whispernet, and a battery that lasts for days if not weeks, pushing digital technology further toward the obvious: the hybrid all-in-one. The iRex models already have touch screens and can read Microsoft Office documents and email. Can color be far behind? Tablet PC, anyone?

What does the push toward the all-in-one killer device have to do with publishing? Plenty. With demand rising for electronic books, newspapers, magazines, and even blogs, publishers understand that change has come. Two things seem blurry: what the market will bear, and how new business models will alter traditional publishing.

Digital technology of some sort is already pressuring publishers, with experiments by many houses. Take, as one example, Daniel Gross' book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, which was released as an e-book months before the physical volume was made available. Gross noted that the decision to release as an "e-book exclusive" was made, in part, to decrease time to market for a very timely book, last fall. The volume, published by Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Shuster, sold "in the thousands". Not bad for material only available to e-readers (including the iPhone). The publisher notes that the time for change is past the point of inevitability. It's matter of how and when digital books will see an upsurge (although when, may have been January, as I noted in an earlier post).

But isn't the Free Press' "e-book exclusive" experiment just a toe-in-the-water approach? Why not think larger than small experiments with single books? Why not wonder about Vook and experiments like it? In other words, if distribution of content IS the change, why not consider completely new ways of delivering it, integrating books, audio, video, games, web and hyperlinking, and social networking, along with local information (think Craigslist)? Make these devices capable of synchrony over the wireless cloud, with enough security to allow us to purchase and even interact with our financial institutions. Now we're talking about the future of publishing! We carry only what we wish (perhaps a handful of books, a day's worth of music, a movie or our favorite television shows, the French lesson we've been working on), and swap them out when we need to, no matter where we are. And we can unburden ourselves and our homes from storing all this physical media.

Proprietary formats for content will hinder, not help, these developments. Standards will be required. And before you recoil from this idea, think of the nascent world wide web, built on a simple mark-up language, with meager graphics capabilities in the 1990s. How far we've come.

Let's ponder the potential, if only from the perspective of the customer. On-demand: Anything that can be delivered digitally.

Such an idea could change the delivery of education as well as publishing. Who doesn't want to lessen the weight on the shoulders of the young? Or will we have to wait until they replace the old guard?

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e-Books on the Rise

Many thanks to Smashwords for the analysis of the uprise in e-book sales, as noted in this snippet:

...wholesale ebook sales for January 2009, as reported by the American Association of Publishers, jumped 173 percent over the same period one year ago to $8.8 million. If you annualize that over 12 months, as I did at left, it means wholesale ebook sales are on track to surpass $100 million in 2009."

If you further assume ... that retail sales are about twice wholesale sales (because the retailer marks up the price paid to the publisher), retail sales could reach $300 million for 2009."

Great news for e-book writers and publishers.

Read the whole article here: Have e-Books Already Gone Mainstream?

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e-Books Pricing - Revisited

Booksquare noted that a boycott's underway:  A cadre of 'revolutionaries' won't buy e-books priced over $9.99, and they've even 'blacklisted' them on the Amazon website.  This is a phenomenon I mentioned in a previous post.

I'm not willing to boycott, exactly.  And I'm a writer.  I know I want to get paid for my work.  But, if I'm completely honest, I do consider price when I'm seeking something new to read.

It's not that I don't want publishers to recover their costs, and it's not that I don't want writers to get paid.  It's that, like so many readers of e-books, I'm having a little trouble understanding the hidden costs of e-book production, the factors that would inflate the cost, when simple people with a little computer literacy can create, produce, market and sell our works ourselves, right from our own home offices.  It can't be distribution costs; how much does a file transfer really cost?

That's one of the reasons why, instead of boycotting, I'm merely avoiding those online sellers that price e-books like hardbacks, even though I can read on my Palm device and on my Kindle.  I shy away from paying "full price", whatever that means, and move toward sites that charge the going rates for paperbacks.

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e-Books, e-Readers, and Publishing

Twitter's been raising my awareness about publishing, e-books, and e-readers, thanks to some of those I've been following. For example, just recently Smashwords noted an amazing 173% increase in e-book wholesale sales for the month of January. And I've been following Joe Wikert's posts on these things in part because he blogs about publishing and also blogs about the Kindle.

Electronic Publishing

e-Books and electronic publishing in general seem to be the way the publishing industry must move in order to stay current. Better said, in order to survive. As much as I love reading, I'm not likely to be lugging around heavy trade books any more with the advent of my e-reader. Not only do my back and shoulders thank me for it, my house also requires a break from the weight. Frankly, I'm much less likely to buy books that are not available in electronic format. Along these same lines, I'm likely to cancel my subscription to my local paper this year, because I'm just tired of recycling all that newsprint and the content it provides me is scant compared with what I can find electronically. I agree with Joe Wikert entirely that the key to making money, and survival for that matter, is providing value, added value as they used to say, to your content and then distributing that content through channels your readers will appreciate. [Shhh. Let's just whisper "Whispernet".] My differences with Joe go into the business models for publishing as they stand (or as they fall, which is where I'm headed).

If we learn something from the troubles of Detroit, it's that an entrenched industry may become so blind to changing external conditions, so complacent and comfortable in its internal bureaucracy, and so inflexible that it cannot even notice the gigantic red flags signaling its own demise. Publishers may be far from the terrifying breakdown of some of our automakers. But can't we wonder about their futures, especially considering the fate of many newspapers [Or read the Christian Science Monitor's commentary entitled "Newspapers Struggle to avoid their own obit")?

Or, let's take the music example. I'm sitting here looking at literally more than 1,000 physical compact discs, which I intend to donate to my local library. The iPod has reduced my appetite for physical media. Likewise, beside me is my Amazon Kindle, which makes me long to junk the contents of nine over-flowing bookcases, because the new medium solves problems with storage, space, cleaning, and weight and adds convenience I've always wanted—I can buy books over the "cloud", without a connection to a heavy computer. Now that a technology like the iPhone has spawned cottage industries, it only makes sense that open development for these e-reading devices will also provide unheard of new opportunities for developers and consumers to read and listen to the products publishers provide. Why, then, is there such resistance from the publishing industry? And there is resistance. Anyone who's ever clicked the link to tell a publisher they want to read this book on their Kindle can attest to the lagging support for e-book publishing. Perhaps this lag derives from a lack of commitment to the medium, a lack of interest, or worst of all, lack of awareness of the news that electronic books are an increasing part of the overall market for books (not to mention other types of content).

Pricing Models for Electronic Content

No one wants to deprive an industry that creates great products of its necessary business income and profits. But let's look at how music used to be priced before big discounters forced prices to their minimums (take the near-defunct BMG's CDs at $18.98 each, as one example, and compare it to whatever you might pay at your local BestBuy) and then think about the iTunes model of 99¢ per song pricing. If an album had 18 songs, it might approach the pricing BMG had once used (although discounts for the album 'package' mean albums rarely find this incredible height), but piecing the album out to the products consumers want—not a whole album, but a single song—seemed to instigate an electronic music revolution once it was linked with an inspired design for the device that delivers it.

Joe Wikert's blog post, "Thoughts on eContent, Free Content, and Pricing Model Options" set my thoughts on fire, though. Shockingly, some publishers seem to believe that e-books ought to cost as much as their hardback counterparts, regardless of the reduction in production costs. This is the Luddite's hope: the e-book market can help publisher's recoup ever-increasing costs of traditional book acquisition, manufacturing and distribution. Promoting such an idea seems like crying over the unemployment of scribes after Gutenberg's presses began to roll. A revolution is at hand. If the publishing oligarchy wants to remain in power, new realities must be embraced, and new methods and means must be invented. Viewing such inspired ideas as CreateSpace, which allows the talent to have direct access to manufacturer and distribution channel without too much editorial control only makes me wonder how publishers will convince the talent that some of their services are necessary costs. One of the more difficult problems for individual authors, especially mid-list and below, has to do with the low levels of commitment of publishers to marketing and promotion of their works. New media like Twitter, YouTube, and blogging, bring the world to an author's laptop and provide promotion at a keystroke. Some authors are wondering, "Why not eliminate the middle man, why not decrease the time to publication, and why not find a way to increase profits for my work through electronic media? "Vanity" isn't another word for self-publishing today. It's beginning to look like a smart solution.

The $9.99 new release pricing on Amazon.com appears to be a reasonable price point to many buyers. After reading many Kindle listserv posts on the topic, most posters believe they will not purchase books above this price point, except for extreme specialty items. Such a pricing model, I've read, would put publishers in the red. Another thread lauded the many samples readers can download before purchasing as a true plus with their Kindles. I have fallen in love with Amazon's price for both an electronic copy and a physical copy of some books that don't format well for the Kindle. For an additional $4, a few months ago I purchased a physical book and its electronic counterpart, always available to me at the Amazon site (this was before I got my Kindle). Thomas Nelson has been re-considering its publishing model. Read CEO Michael Hyatt's amazing blog post here.

But one must ask, then, if the market won't bear larger prices for electronic content, does the publishing industry need to re-structure or consider a new approach to bundling these versions of the same content? Probably. My own experience as an employee in an industry whose pricing models didn't hold through the recessions in the recent past taught me this much: when an industry goes through this kind of shift and companies don't offer value for price, recognizing the new realities, the consumer refuses to pay and the company cannot be sustained. It's wake-up call time for publishing. Can publishers hear it?

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Publishers ‘R Us

I've been doing a lot of thinking about electronic publishing these days, especially since I received an Amazon Kindle 2 as a gift in late February.

The race appears to be on in electronic publishing. Demand for e-readers has reached out to cell phone owners with wireless providers, and it may have reached a tipping point, which is why every week there are articles like these in the popular press.

• From BusinessWeek: Move Over Kindle; E-Books Hit Cell Phones
  
• From CNet: Amazon Kindle Books Coming to Cell Phones?
  
• From New York Times: Google and Amazon to Put More Books on Cell Phones
  
• From Forbes.com: Barnes & Noble Launches E-Book Reader For RIM; Apple Sued Over E-book Reader
  

Some of these would-be publishers and distributors will definitely find the competition so stiff that they will be forced to drop out of the market, especially since it appears that some of these companies believe it's still early in the race. What interests me about the whole competition is that Amazon has quietly led a revolution and now a whole host of companies are fighting for belated bragging rights.

If you don't believe me, take a look at these wholly-owned subsidiaries of Amazon:

• Create Space - https://www.createspace.com/
  
• Book Surge - http://www.booksurge.com
  

Amazon is vying to be the distributor of choice for electronic books, music, and film. And they have given artists a way to eliminate the arbiters of taste (companies and industries who select, groom, edit and distribute artistic works). CreateSpace allows the talent to go directly to the public, using Amazon as the distributor. Amazon also owns Mobipocket, an e-book creator and a mobile reader for the masses. And if authors want some help, BookSurge is there to provide traditional services, such as editing and promotion. That's a bold move, and extremely risky. But in the short-term, it may very well be that the only publisher you as an author, filmmaker, or musician, will need is your own initiative. "Publishers 'R Us", with Amazon as our collective distribution channel.

Amazon has become the electronic and physical book distributor that no publisher can ignore, especially since the advent of the Kindle and the use of Whispernet, its agreement with Sprint to deliver content wirelessly to customers for free. I'm incredibly impressed at Jeff Bezos' behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Working with Sprint while it's down on its luck was likely a contract negotiated to mutual benefit, but Amazon's stands benefit beyond Sprint's most compelling fantasies. Other wireless companies are wondering how to get in on these new streams of income invented by Amazon (yes, I mean providing content wirelessly over "Whispernet"), since the cell phone industry is maturing. That's why we're seeing a Kindle client for the iPhone, Mobipocket available for Blackberry, not to mention Google's plans for Android, and so on. Frankly, I expect this market to become more chaotic in the short term, with lawsuits abounding and dozens of players trying to shoulder their ways into some piece of the market.

It's hard not to argue that Amazon is leading this pack, probably to the dismay of other electronics companies, wireless companies, and publishers alike. If we see a number of publishers dragging their collective feet to enter this race, could be because they've neglected to stay fit enough to jump the hurdles over the huge obstacles of digital rights, poaching, and outright theft. The music industry has gone this way before them, with plenty of difficult lessons learned. Amazon may have solved the problems while traditional publishers were sitting on the sidelines. Only time will tell.

While it may become a wild race to the finish for companies who risk entering this high-stakes race, I'm hoping the competition will do wonders for consumers. I cannot wait for the catalog of human knowledge to be available over some advanced wireless network.

NOTE: This post first appeared on my closed blog PROSELADY and is reproduced here in its entirety.

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Reading Progress

Since I received a Kindle 2 as a gift, I have a number of new books to read. [See my Kindle review here.]

I am on track to make my goal (2 books per month plus one bonus book). So far this year I’ve read:

• Three Junes by Julia Glass
  
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
  
• Change or Die by Alan Deutschman
  
• My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
  
• 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper
  
• A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter
  
• Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being by Andrew Weil
  
• Anti-Cancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber
  
• The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
  

You can see my list of books I intend to read this year at:

http://www.listsofbests.com/list/61845

but that list doesn’t add up to 25 because I wanted to leave room for some new releases.

See more progress on: read 25 books in 2009

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READ: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Let me say at the outset of this review that I usually read literary fiction. This book was a departure for me, one that I took on the faith of the 1600+ positive reviews on Amazon.com. Those reviews misled me, I’m afraid.

It’s mystifying why so many reviewers loved this book.

Jacob Jankowski, now over ninety years old, looks back on his decision to run away with the circus life during the Depression era after the tragic death of his parents forces his departure from veterinary school. He recalls the magic, the animals, the circus workforce, love affair, and, of course, the elephant mentioned in the book’s title.

It’s not a bad story, a fairly straightforward narrative without any literary flourishes, written in plain language and present tense. Certainly the author did her research so she could use the right lingo and details. Flash-forwards to the protagonist’s current life in a nursing home only provide a pretense for the ending, unfortunately. The plot is so thin that until about 3/4ths of the way through, I was convinced there wasn’t one. Likewise, the characters are fairly thinly realized, except for the “paranoid schizophrenic” villain and the intelligent elephant, Rosie. I found myself wondering why I even liked the protagonist, who fashioned himself as a kind of savior for a couple of victimized lesser players. Recently bereaved, the protagonist’s experience of bereavement is completely absent from the book, which I found unrealistic at best.

That said, I was surprised that I stuck it out and read to the end, which is why I didn’t give the book a lower rating. In all honesty, the last quarter of the book is quite possibly the best, when the main character finally acts on all his misguided desires. However, the final scene disappointed me; it seemed a bit too contrived.

Light reading, this one. If you want to read for 30 minutes before bed, this isn’t a bad bet, because it doesn’t not require much thought or deconstruction.

See more progress on: read 25 books in 2009

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READ: Three Junes by Julia Glass

Entry No. 2 in my list of 25 books I will read in 2009.

Here is my brief review:

This book won the National Book Award of 2002.

Glass’ book is a family saga of the McLeods, in three parts, during three Junes. Part one, “Collies”, recounts the story of Scots Paul and Maureen McLeod and their three sons, Fenno, Dennis and David. Part two, “Upright”, tells the story of Fenno, an adult ex-patriot homosexual who now lives in New York city and whose love and lust bring into his life a music critic and a nomadic photographer. And finally part three, “Boys”, told by Fern Olinsky, recounts the intersection of lives.

I enjoyed reading Three Junes, although it took me weeks to get through, and I don’t think I’ve fully digested it yet. Glass’ prose impressed me throughout, with fully realized descriptions, spot-on metaphors, and fairly depicted characters. An aspect of the book, its tri-partite structure with its changing of point of view and tense, bothered me at first but won me over in the end. Each part almost illustrates fiction’s fashions over time (third person omniscient, first person, third person present tense), and moves more sure-footedly into the present as the story unfolds, with flashbacks to fill in the backstory as each June moves forward. That structure impressed me as a virtuoso performance from a first-time novelist.

4.5 stars out of 5

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READ: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple in the 1950s, who long for a life more uplifting and less stultifying than the suburban Connecticut where they come to raise their young family, because they see themselves as among the best and brightest. Frank has, by his own admission, “the dullest job you can possibly imagine”. But a plot by April to spring them from the trap of boredom and suffocation in their lives, including the insufferable irritations of enduring their friends and neighbors, goes awry.

Yates’ book reads close to character, very much third person limited point of view, with quick, conversational prose. My only quibble was with his shift mid-way through the book, to the points of view of other characters, a little late in coming for me, but necessary to illuminate character and move the plot forward.

Careful characterizations of supporting players—the mild mannered Milly and Shep Campbell, the nervous Mrs. Givings and her hapless husband Howard, and the foil of the Givings’ son John, long incarcerated in a mental institution, give the book more resonance.

Having grown up in the environment described in this book, rich with its suburban cocktail hours, crowded station wagons, desolate evenings at run-down clubs listening to outdated music, and dreadful presumptions and pretenses, Yates’ depiction brought back memories I’d thought were long-lost. It’s obvious that he has both sympathy and contempt for his characters, whose lives are shellacked by a coat of pleasantries to disguise their shallowness. He captures this culture so deftly that I found myself recovering my own revulsion for that time, those ghastly cocktail hours, and the drunken decisions that led people to self-disgust long afterwards.

The characters are only marginally likeable, so the book may put you off. But it is a masterful period piece and a kind of morality tale for our time. As art, it stands up well.

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READ: My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s memoir of her stroke, at the age of 37, brings the experience of stroke to the reader. Because understanding stroke requires some knowledge of the brain, Taylor presents a couple of chapters on brain anatomy. She then goes on to describe the gradual loss of her ability to function in the left-brain sense: unable to keep facts in order and use simple mathematics during the singular experience of the stroke itself, she had to figure out a way to recall and retain the crucial telephone numbers that would bring help, for example. The stroke, a hemorrhage on the left side of her brain, affected her ability to sense the boundaries of her body, her speech, her memory, and the focus of her perceptions. In fact, it gave her access to a profound experience of oneness and overwhelming joy. Her recovery involved much re-learning, with the help of her mother, a former mathematics teacher, and took eight years.

I enjoyed three-fourths of this book very much, and was impressed with the determination with which Dr. Taylor took on the arduous task of re-educating herself. Her good cheer radiates throughout the book, a joy she experienced during and after the stroke, attributed by her as the rule of her right brain.

However, the last couple of chapters read more like new-age spirituality and self-help psychology than memoir, invoking many recommendations on how to stay cheerful and in the present moment. Although they testify to Dr. Taylor’s experiences, I could have done without them and would have enjoyed reading further details on Taylor’s years of re-learning and the angst of regaining her identity as a scientist, when so much of her memory had been hidden from her during the recovery.

It’s such a quick and easy read that I finished it in just a few hours.

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READ; Change or Die by Alan Deutschman

Deutschman’s book lays out a three-step framework for change that appears to be universal, crossing cultural, economic, and social boundaries. He uses a mnemonic for his framework: Relate, Repeat, and Reframe, as well as one for its opposite: Facts, Fear, and Force. I’ve read a few books on change, and this is the first one I’ve truly enjoyed. Most are either fear-based or so bogged down in process as to be difficult to implement. This one makes neither error. Rather, Deutschman’s first order for change sounds simple but is quite profound. In order to make change, a first step is to form a relationship with someone who believes you can change. In other words, to change, one must be able to hope for change and have at least one other person believe that the hope is not ill-founded. Deutschman is a journalist, and his writing is straightforward and highly readable. Because of his background, he had access to some fairly high-profile people who exemplify the principles he outlines here. Recommended for anyone who wants to make a change in their personal or professional lives, their organizations, or industries.

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READ: 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper

I have finished this book, the first of my 25 books this year.

Here’s my brief review:

As he is driving home from a minister’s conference, Baptist minister Don Piper is hit by a semi-truck that crosses into his lane. He is pronounced dead at the scene. For the next 90 minutes, Piper experiences heaven where he is greeted by those who had influenced him spiritually. He hears beautiful music and feels true peace. Back on earth, a passing minister who had also been at the conference is led to pray for Don even though he was told that the man was already dead. Piper miraculously comes back to life and the bliss of heaven is replaced by a long and painful recovery. For years Piper kept his heavenly experience to himself. Finally, however, friends and family convinced him to share his remarkable story. Don goes on to become an inspiration for his faith and for his recovery.

3 starts out of 5

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My Month with the Amazon Kindle 2

Note: The following review was posted to my closed blog, PROSELADY, and is reproduced here in its entirety.

Bottom Line: I love my Kindle, I'm already addicted, and I'd rather read on it than anything else, especially paper. (That's it. You're done. Don't bother reading on unless you're curious.)

The Long, Windy Review

I'm a reader. In fact, it's fair to say I've had a love affair with books all my life, and blindness is about the only thing that could prevent me from reading every single day. [Read about my somewhat traumatic eye troubles and book love here, if you're interested.] Therefore, Amazon Kindle ownership seemed to be made for someone like me.

Here are the Top Ten things to love about the Kindle, and a few quibbles, following.

PROs:
1) Size. It is a perfect size, almost exactly the same as my Moleskine journal, but much thinner (without its cover—I bought the Amazon-designed leather cover with the hinges, which suits me fine). And it's light—just 10.2 oz, without the cover. I used to carry at least one trade-size paperback in my briefcase every day. Now, it's just the Kindle. Because I can leave those heavy books at home, I find myself only reading what I can read on the Kindle, too. About the limited selection of books, well, see below.

2) eInk. It's so easy to read on the Kindle that I now prefer it to reading on pretty much anything else, including paper, computer screens. Billboards are possibly the only thing easier to read. eInk does not tire my eyes the way a bright computer monitor does.

3) Ease of use. It was easy to figure out--quite intuitive! I did read the user's guide and downloaded two other guides as well so that I would know the ins and outs. Menus are easy to use and I really like the 5-way controller. Buttons are well placed. The keyboard reminds me of my cell phone keyboard (I have an LG enV2); keys are small but quite serviceable and the spacing is more like a keyboard than the phone. The ability to change the font size has to be one of my favorite features, for someone whose eyes aren't what they used to be. That feature makes reading on the treadmill possible for me.

4) Instant Gratification. Talk about instant gratification! Whispernet allows me to download a sample and then if I'm enthralled, I can buy the full version of the book in under a minute. I've done that twice now. In fact, it's so easy to buy books from the Kindle or from the Amazon website, that I've spent more than I care to admit here on reading materials since I got the Kindle. And free 3G network is sweet, too!

5) Virtual library. I wanted a Kindle so that I could convert my massive library to an electronic library, and it's letting me do just that, a little at a time (because I just can't afford to convert hundreds of volumes at once). Now that I have a Kindle, I can see that I will really want to do this as soon as affordable and as soon as the books are available. I cannot wait to donate my physical books to some worthy cause as I replace them. (See why I need an e-reader here.)

There's a lot of press about the limited library available, and quite a lot of snarky comments about "only being able to load content from Amazon". This is untrue, a fact I've written to some reviewers about. A number of websites offer public domain works for free, such as Feedbooks. From that and Manybooks, together, I've downloaded more than 100 classic works of both fiction and nonfiction.

You can load anything to your Kindle that's in the following formats, either through USB or through their email conversion service.

• Kindle (AZW)
• TXT
• Audible (formats 4, Audible Enhanced (AAX))
• MP3
• unprotected MOBI
• PRC natively
• PDF, HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion.

6) Space. Not much dusting involved with the Kindle, no bookshelves needed, no heavy boxes to move either. Gotta love that!

7) Battery life. I am a nut about battery life. I cannot stand having to charge a cell phone daily for example, and try to choose a phone that will last for days without charging. I charge my Kindle about once a week in spite of the fact that I read daily and have downloaded a number of books and samples and subscribe to a few RSS feeds through KindleFeeder. Battery life, as far as I can tell with my usage, far exceeds my expectations.

8) Dictionary and Web Browser. If I don't know or understand a word I'm reading, I just place the cursor next to the word and the dictionary launches at the bottom of the screen, displaying the word's meaning; I can go to the dictionary entry and return to the page I was reading quickly and easily, without ever leaving my chair. That's a feature physical books can't have. The rudimentary web browser does make it easy to research something in more depth as I read. I appreciate that very much.

9) Notes and Highlights. I can make notes and highlight as much as I want in any book I want. Kindle remembers those notes and highlights even if I've archived the book. My notes are searchable too.

10) Book Prices. New York Times Bestsellers and many other new books are priced at $9.99 or lower, prices that make reading more enticing than it's been in a while. Some authors offer a limited time lower price (and even free) for a newly released volume just for Kindle readers. I've gotten three or four brand new books just because I've been lucky enough to hear about the introductory offers.

CONs:
OK, after all that, you'd think I wouldn't have anything to nag about. Not so.

A) Organization. The Kindle lacks the ability to organize the library, except in the most fundamental ways. I can view my books by Recent, Title, or Author. Period. Not so bad if your library contains 10 items. A real pain if it has 1,000. Of course the Kindle is searchable, so I could find an item through that functionality. And one could archive 990 items and just keep the 10 on the Kindle that are in the reading queue. That is kind of what I've done with mine.

B) Book Availability. I want to have all my books in an electronic format eventually but not all books are available at the moment. And, just as I wish with my iPod, I wish that all my books would be compatible with my e-reader in the way that I wish all my music was playable regardless of device. Not yet.

And maybe not ever, since copy and tampering protections just aren't what they need to be to prevent unscrupulous individuals from toying with copyrighted works. The race is on between Sony, Amazon, and other smaller players for market domination. In the background, publishers are wringing their hands over what to do to save publishing in general while Amazon launches its multiple electronic publishing venues. I'm betting on Amazon, frankly, even though I'm not fond of a single entity controlling as much of the market as it would appear that they will.

C) No Desktop Application. One solution could be to have an optional desktop application like Mobipocket Reader, so that the library could be contained elsewhere (with better organization). I have the Desktop and Mobile applications on my Palm, but abandoned them because 1) the screen is so small, and 2) the titles are so much more expensive at this site. Amazon archives your purchases on their servers to make sure that you'll never lose them to device failure or computer failure, however. But a computer application that allowed me to read either on the Kindle or on my computer screen might be nice. Since Amazon owns Mobipocket Reader, I wonder if they will lean this way.

D) Text-to-Speech. While I like the idea of Text-to-Speech, the voices are far too robotic for my taste. I don't think the Author's Guild has much to worry about with this feature. It is comforting to know that, should I have more trouble with my eyes, my Kindle can still read to me.

FEATURES I'D LOVE TO SEE ADDED, SOME DAY

--Color screen
--Touch screen
--Folders and/or organizational features

LEARNING MORE ABOUT KINDLE and KINDLE CONTENT
For about three weeks, I've been subscribed to a listserv about the Kindle, just to glean others' tips and tricks. But a few blogs and websites have proven more useful. I've been doing my best to keep up with Kindle Nation, Stephen Windwalker's informative but somewhat cluttered blog, Blog Kindle, Kindle Reader, a website focused more on content than the device itself, and Kindle Chronicles, a terrific weekly podcast about all things Kindle that I've subscribed to on my iPod. Joe Wikert's Kindleville blog inspired me to follow his Tweets.

I'm looking forward to taking my Kindle everywhere with me and using it for years.

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Sight for Sore Eyes

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. -- Sir Richard Steele

My eyes had been bothering me, so I had them checked out by an eye doctor.

“Very dry,” she intoned with a cheerfulness and confidence that surprised me. Yes, my left eye had changed and I’d need a new prescription, but it was the medication-induced dryness that apparently caused my distress. The remedy would be expensive eye drops, administered up to 10 times per day, to counteract the effect of medications necessary to keep my asthma under control.

For a week I suffered with the older glasses and dutifully applied the drops, while the new prescription lenses, an advanced type of polycarbonate, were ground. When they were ready, surprisingly, my eyes rebelled from the discipline of the new view. My left eye, the one which had bothered me most, suddenly refused to focus. It ached, then my face ached, then my whole head throbbed. And reading, a pleasure all my life, became onerous.

The thought that I might not be able to see the world that had brought me joy frightened me.
Years ago as a college student, I’d dined with a professor a couple decades my senior. One of his stories involved his retinal detachment, a condition which had been repaired by surgery. Nevertheless, he began several sentences, “When I was blind…”, a clause that has stayed with me ever since, for its ability to induce a kind of panic and revulsion.

I cannot be blind, ever, because the blind cannot read, which is as essential to my well-being as breath. Of course the blind have Braille. Audiobooks can fill in for text. But how can one who’s had a lifelong love with picture books and prose describe the loss which blindness could suddenly bring? Let me list a childhood, in short: Goodnight, Moon; Bedtime for Frances; The Borrowers; Strawberry Girl; Misty of Chincoteague; Ramona the Brave. My beloved wore a library hard cover and a stale and dusty scent. But their small shapes and statures belied their philanthropic largess, granting a quiet child of a vagabond family reliability and solace. Books stood for solidity, consistency, and continuity. To lose my sight, I expect, might be as jarring as losing my parents, tearing away something which had nurtured and taught me throughout life. No Braille can give such pleasure, and no audio can compare. Eyes required. Case closed.

My eyes grew too tired to read. Staying open challenged them. The muscles of my face tensed with pain, and the tension worsened the pain. Working strained my eyes until I had to stop. And the medical diagnosis remained the same: Dry eyes. More drops. Try to get used to the new lenses.

Inevitably, my reading life shrank. Perusing a magazine, I was drawn to the pictures, reading captions and a paragraph or two, but setting it down shortly. Newspaper text taxed my eyes to their limit. Reading text on the computer allowed me to increase the font sizes, but my eyes grew tired in the glare of the screen. In withdrawal, I ached for my text fix but the intensity of my pain held me back. I even wanted to close my eyes when someone spoke to me, because the distraction of my eyes kept me from following a conversation.

My eyes were worn out. Mental atrophy seemed my fate.

Randomly, ironically, a webpage drew me in. It described an exhibit called Dialog in the Dark, in which blind guides take the sighted through dark exhibits, to experience blindness. Oddly, this one short news story reminded me that my limits had not been set. My vision had been altered but not eliminated, and the world was not yet dark. I wasn’t ready to trade my sight for a world of sound, scent, and touch. I had options.

I reverted to my old glasses, which helped me work again. And one day, with a disciplined approach to my eye drops, my ability to read recovered. I read a paragraph, then a page, and upwards of several pages of a professional article I needed to understand. In the evening, the stack of books which sat collecting dust appealed to me. In just an hour, one had captivated me and kept me reading until I’d neglected the eye drop schedule, and dryness made me stop.

A sudden insight, after a morning of wearing the old lenses: perhaps someone had erred. What if there was a disconnect between these new, high-tech lenses and the astigmatism of my dry left eye? The sunglasses I’d had made from the new prescription did not appear to bother my eyes at all, but I had not worn them for extended periods. Thus, a simple scientific experiment, one day at a time: Old glasses, new sunglasses, new glasses. Painless (still dry) two days; pained and unable to function on the third. New lenses would be required in the new frames. And that’s how my sight—and one of the true pleasures in life, reading—was restored.

It’s got me thinking about the frailties of our senses, though, about their inevitable declines. For now, I’m happy to see these words, and share them with you, knowing you’ll be using your sight to hear my voice.


UPDATE: Ophthalmologist opinion: My eyes appear to be extremely and permanently dry, and I will require prescription eyedrops for the rest of my life to preserve my sight.

Note: "Sight for Sore Eyes" was originally published in my closed blog, PROSELADY. Reproduced here by request.

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Welcome

Welcome to The Author's Way. As a working writer, my posts will contain excerpts of current work, commentary on creativity, writing, books, publishing, and training and development (yes, writing for a living helping people learn is the day job). Related topics may appear occasionally as well. I hope you find something here you'll find interesting, entertaining, or useful.

Due to blog piracy, I've had to close my previous blog and open here. Archived posts may appear here to open the blog.

Thanks so much for visiting.

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