I LOVE my Kindle. It is definitely my preferred method of reading. I still marvel at holding an entire library of books in my hand. Imagine what our ancestors would have thought of it. And since my eyesight is bad I do love adjusting the font size until its just right for me. And my favorite part, since I do a lot of research, is downloading books (in PDF format) from Googlebooks to my computer and then uploading them to my Kindle.  The kindle charges me a tiny fee for this. I think I paid 68 cents for the last book that I uploaded. It was an obscure Italian book translated into English called “The House by the Medlar Tree” by Giovanni Verga.  Only a few years ago I would have needed to travel to the University of California to read this book. Last year I could read it on my home computer thanks to Googlebooks. But now I can curl up with it in my recliner and thoroughly enjoy the book. A wonderful, wonderful thing.  Really, the only thing that I am not crazy about is that there are no page numbers associated with Kindle books. You can make electronic bookmarks. And the Kindle keeps track of exactly where you left off (from each book that you are reading.) But there is absolutely no page numbers in the Kindle e-books, just a percentage of how far have gone in the book.

I honestly don’t know how the Kindle compares to the other e-readers out there.  I am a regular Amazon customer. It’s one of the few places on the web that I trust with my credit card number. I like shopping there and they always have good recommendations for me based on my shopping history. That is the main reason that I chose the Kindle.

My latest book (just published:  a short story collection called Out of the Mountains ) had electronic galleys that came to me by email.  I was supposed to print them out and mark them, but some publishers I’m told are asking the authors to do mark-up electronically as well.

But here’s the point:  I have at least three books from the early nineteen eighties when I was first publishing that are out of print from the original publishers and were never digital in the first place.  A couple of them can be ordered now through the wonders of one-book-at-a-time technology  (the hard copy was scanned in as  .pdf files), but as I begin to prepare some of my books for e-readers, I wanted to get them scanned in as word processer files so I can make changes and digitalize for e-readers.

I’ve now done one with a pleasant-to-work-with company in Missouri called Golden Images, LLC. If you try them write to  Stan Drew, who may be the whole show, but is in any case very responsive to email.  The price is less that .50 a page, much less for .pdf files, but I think most of us with old books want the word processor files.  Even with Stan’s good work, I am having to go through the book  (Higher Ground) looking for anomalies  (apostrophes that became Greek sigmas, etc.) but that’s fine because I wanted to see how the book felt anyhow– this was a book that I wanted at one point to make changes in, but couldn’t face retyping.  So I’ll take my time and have fun.

More later about the differences in a typewritten book and a word processed book.

But much more interesting to me is the first group, the ones accustomed  to “saving” images off the web (I do this) and to downloading music and movies– a whole host of materials from the web that we  consider fair game for fair use.

The piece suggests that young people raised in this world, themselves perhaps participants in the great group writing project of Wikipedia, really see quotation from sources in a different way from a previous generation with perhaps a different view of self and individuality.

Interesting stuff– I’m on the writers’ side of course, except that I want all information to be free, live long, and prosper.

And!  He has an app for his computer that reads books for Kindle, and he bought a copy of Trespassers (Hamilton Stone Editions)  from Smashwords and loaded it, and there it was, my first ebook sale, sort of.  Well, well, well.

The awesome lion-guarded 42nd Street Library in New York far more like the Metropolitan Museum than the library where I first took out books.  But in some weird way libraries never became my preferred  source of books: the books I loved most were in people’s houses (my mother’s set of Charlotte and Emily Bronte with the Rockwell Kent woodcut illustrations;  a book of cartoons in my aunt’s house in Scott County Tennessee that were like a twisted version of New York to me– drunk flappers and street urchins, pigeon breasted matrons).  I liked to own books.  I bought all the Black Stallion books, $2.00 each of birthday and holiday money over several years.

Why did I never bond with libraries? It wasn’t about ownership as much as about intimacy, perhaps.  I know people who read constantly from libraries, sometimes visiting several branches in a day to get enough books to tide them over their vacation. And I DID sign out books, stacks of books, but they weren’t mine.  I had to return them.  There was a vague anxiety about getting them back in a timely fashion, unsoiled, with no dog ears.

Partly, I think  I don’t like the social aspect of running into people I know. Reading is deeply private to me.  When I read, I leave my body here, and go elsewhere.   I trade books on Paperback Swap; I buy cheap used books via Bibliofind and the other places for used books. I look through my husband’s mysteries and thrillers if I’m really at a loss.  I hope soon, finally! to have an electronic reader, access to all books, all knowledge, all entertainment, all experience.

All the  little colorful devices with their Apps and the fast moving thumbs sending notes around the world like freed-up school kids from my childhood.  Snapping pictures, finding out if there’s traffic on the freeway, what’s the weather, where is the nearest public restroom, let me make a reservation at a restaurant, buy a book get the news.
I started feeling sidelined, at best, with my small but clunky cell phone with a piece of plastic broken off, and all it does is take and make calls.
Another article asked, Will the I-Pad replace the PC?

And the answer was an intriguing one: Yes, for consumers, No for creators.
Some of my confidence came back.  I have, in fact, been using a compute for more than a quarter of a century. I was sold, completely and totally, when my brother-in-law told me I would never have to retype again. I hated to retype.  I had left things in articles and stories that I would have changed otherwise if it hadn’t meant typing up a whole fresh copy of the manuscript.  So I got the earliest computer I could, a portable sewing machine sized Kaypro rival called Zorba.  I learned the ridiculous, arbitrary code of Word Star.  It only took two or three 5 and a quarter floppy disks to hold a whole novel!  It was a miracle.

It really was a miracle, too.  I had no interest in learning to program, and the world of bulletin boards and chat that some of our friends’ teenage sons were involved in didn’t interest me.  In fact, I refused a color monitor fo r several years, wanting to keep the computer as a no-retyping machine.  Email caught my attention, though, and then, in rapid succession, all the riches for research of the internet.

I now even keep websites and blog, and, with some reluctance, shop on the internet as well. I own a little netbook for taking to the city with me, and I never use the yellow pages anymore or, really the phone book.  Like all of us, I have moved a great deal of my life online. The struggle for me, though, is to keep separate the world of consuming that even the PC thrusts at you (forget the little mobile devices) and the world of making and expressing.