BUT NOW- it has finally happened.  It is finally possible to borrow from the library.  I had to go in person first to get my card renewed  (and I ended up promising to present a program for the library in the spring!) and they were very helpful showing me the website for the regional pool of library e-books, many with waiting lists, but I made the experiment by using “advanced search” and skimming over available books, and found Sarah Waters’ newest.  I now have it on my Kindle, for two weeks, anyhow, and I’m thrilled.  I don’t know how this works region to region, but here you get up to 5 books, and there is no extension– you go back on the waiting list if you didn’t finish.  Fine, who cares.  To borrow a Kindle book, you get sent to Amazon, and I had a little to-do about which email was my sign in, and actually ended up calling and speaking to a human being, but the next phase is beginning to happen….

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html?ref=technology

In the Amazon business model, there’s no advance, and often no agent, although some agents are beginning to participate as publishers.  I have to say that my sympathy for the big commercial publishers  (not that Amazon isn’t or won’t be one soon) is very limited.  They dropped me unceremoniously 25 years ago– well, not entirely true, that was Scribner’s.  My last big publisher was HarperCollins for the Marco kid books, and that was only fifteen years ago– anyhow, the bottom line is, Conventional publishers dropped me and a lot of my friends– mid-list and literary writers of high repute and great accomplishment– and we’ve been scrambling ever since.  I’ve used small presses, nonprofit presses, university presses, cooperative presses:  I’ve published with all of these, as well as with Scribner’s and HarperCollins, and had Sc & HC been more nurturing of me when I was not a best seller for them, I might be less ready to embrace the Great Change going on now with ebooks and self publishing.  There are myriad problems including, at the very least, who are the gatekeepers, but also vast opportunities.  And for me, a lot of fun too.  The opportunities include simply being able to make books available to people who who might want to read them– miniscule numbers beside what bestseller oriented publishers except, but human beings, readers, communication.  I have been having a great time with my various ventures.

There’s a lot of confusion right now among technology, profit taking, ownership, books as physical objects and books as reading experiences.

Next move, I read some more online and discoverd the existes of Calibre, an open source software that will translate e-pub or whatever for kindle (or just about anything to anything, actually).  You are supposed to be able to have books emailed to your Kindle account, but why?  It also loads directly to the device if attached to the computer, so I’ve translated my first book (just Calibre’s handbook) and downloaded.  Cool.
This is all new and happening fast.

Once I got used to it, I liked it a lot.  Here are some initial observations:

The lightness of the device (when it isn’t wearing its new protective cover), is amazing and much better for reading in bed than any book I’ve read since comix.

Something about the format, the relatively small screen, which is highly readable, changes my reading style with the intense focus on the present paragraphs.  I find it hard to skim and modulate my speed, which I apparently never realized I did so much of.  Since I will also be reading hard copy books, as well as the Kindle, I hope this simply turns into another way of reading, an addition to my reading repertoire.

What does look likely, and as I planned, is that I will gradually get all the free Victorian novels onto the Kindle and always travel with Geo. Eliot, Jane Austen, Uncle Tony, Charles Dickens, and all the rest of them.  I’m not so sure about the Great Russians because of the issue of translations– the best translations are probably not going to be free.  Do I really want Constance Garnett’s Tolstoy?  Maybe I do.  Anyhow, what I’m likely to carry with me is going to be out-of-copyright English language novels.

I haven’t tried poetry yet.

I haven’t bought a book  for money yet.  I was going to try the last of the Fire and Ice George R.R. Martin sword and sorcery books, but had already ordered a cheap used copy– a giant hard back.  Too bad.  I might still shell out six dollars to try it on the Kindle.

I’m not satisfied with how some of the books for Kindle look that are from sources other than the Amazon store (including the Smashwords books ): they have a double space between paragraphs, a combination of business letter and conventional narrative paragraphing that irritates me because it denies us novelists another means of expression– the double space.

More anon.

Well,  I googled “kindle page turns negative,” and there was a site with a lot of commentary about this from people with identities  like  “Shangrilachica,” “Desertmama,” “Mccook666,” and a whole host of others who all agreed that there is something inherent in the e-ink technology (Nook, Sony, Kindle, all of them) that causes a black flash (what I called a negative) when you turn the page.

So it looks like get used to it or don’t use it.  Which is fine, I’m willing.

What’s odd is why it took me so long to notice it.  Was it that I was only beginning to get comfortable enough to sink into the story and be irritated by something pulling me out?  Up to this point, I may have been less reading and more enjoying the awareness of Me Reading My Kindle.

But now I know: I have to suck it up until it becomes as invisible as my hand picking up the corner of a piece of paper and turning it.

Do you still love the smell of ditto fluid in the morning?

I remember that one of my earliest thrills with using a computer and printer was that I could type up a perfect ditto master– these were easy-to-use sheets you fastened to a machine that made purplish copies using a smelly spirit solution, and you could draw on them as well as type– but you couldn’t correct, because every mark reproduced.  For a fast but really sloppy typist like me, this was hugely annoying- to make a handout for students with all kinds of cross-outs and blotches.  Still, the ditto was easier than the mimeograph, where mistakes had to be patched with a special fluid, dried, and then painstakingly retyped.  So for me, our first computer was about making copies without pain.

I still have a few purple sheets of samples from literature and other things I copied all those years ago– actually, I found a ditto machine in a back room at Kean College when I was adjuncting there, and used it long after xerox was available, because there were no professors lining up at the ditto!

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.

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.