Posts about ebooks

Feb32011

My Own Two Cents: Why I Hate My Kindle


I love technology. I may write about fantastic societies without computers or electronics, but I still love my iPod, my netbook, and my Playstation. Despite this, I hate my Kindle.

It was a generous Christmas gift, and I’ve been trying to experiment and work around my initial impressions, but so far any attempt to find a more positive angle hasn’t worked.

Let’s start with the consumption problem. When I buy a latte in a disposable cup and drink it, it’s been consumed. I trash the cup, I notice the expense on my debit card statement, and I move on. I’ve consumed something, and it is wholly gone. Books on the Kindle feel the same way for me. I can’t give them to a friend, donate them to the Denver Children’s Home, sell , or trade them. The book I purchased for the Kindle was the same price as a paperback, and it’s gone. I’m never going to read it again. From an author’s standpoint, this is a good thing: a single copy for a single reader, so a book will have higher sales figures, but it also impacts the ability of a reader to spread the book’s popularity by word of mouth or loaning it out. If eBook’s cost were lower than a paperback it might appeal to me.

The second problem involves the portability: I can use the Kindle to load up on books so that say, on a two week trip to Europe, I’m not toting around as much weight. But I can’t use the Kindle during takeoff and landing, two periods when I’m most likely to read while everyone else watches the belt bit or braces for impact.

I thought perhaps the vocal feature would be useful: I could listen to any book I purchased, but that quickly proved grating. It was like being read to by Stephen Hawking, so I’m more likely to pay for an Audible book that I can stand to listen to.

A friend pointed out that pdfs can be transferred over, but this did not work very well either. I have a lot of reference books, mostly historical, that could be usefully stored in a digital form, but the Kindle doesn’t handle viewing them very well. You need to zoom in and around in order to see the pages. This kills the pdf’s ease of use completely, and I’m more likely to stick with my netbook. This problem might be solved by upgrading to the larger version, but that would further degrade the portability factor.

I am sure that the environmental impact of printing a book and shipping it to a store outweighs the cost of transmitting it wirelessly to the Kindle, but I’m also tired of having to charge the various devices in my life. A book is perfectly serviceable. It does not require a battery or one more cord in a drawer.

These are my own impressions, and two friends swear I’ll come around, that in no time the Kindle will be as indispensable to my life as my iPod, but so far I have to say that I’m going to stick with killing trees and browsing bookstores.

Jun232010

Had to Share


Laura Miller’s Salon piece on self publishing. The section on slush was what I found the most interesting:

It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters — not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés — for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that’s almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn’t been there themselves: Call it slush fatigue. You walk in the door pledging your soul to literature, and you walk out with a crazed glint in your eyes, thinking that the Hitler Youth guy who said, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver” might have had a point after all. Recovery is possible, but it’ll take a while (apply liberal doses of F. Scott Fitzgerald). In the meantime, instead of picking up every new manuscript with an open mind and a tiny nibbling hope, you learn to expect the worst. Because almost every time, the worst is exactly what you’ll get.

I’m sure Miller’s article will be getting a lot of discussion on the publishing blogs, and I’m very interested in seeing how it’s received. I obviously have a stake in this matter, and I’m one of the partial. But I also know that my book under the bed was rightfully rejected. Does the query process truly act as quality control, or is it stiffing good books? All the reading I’m doing is beginning to hint to both.