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Pages do not a novel make, nor printed words a book
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Location: Blogs Pugilist's Spew |
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| Posted by: Pugilist |
5/20/2011 |
Let me start by saying I own a lot of books. I own, literally, thousands of books. I own so many books I double fill my bookshelves, have books stored in boxes, have books in my bedroom, in the living room, in my guest room, in storage, in my attic, in my basement, and probably other place I have currently forgotten.
I own a lot of books.
I'm ready to nearly never buy another physical book again.
Because I own a lot of books that I love to reread, I often have two or three or five copies of a book that I love and can no longer find new so I pick up a copy whenever it crosses my path. I buy books to read, not as an investment. These books take up a lot of space, are subject to water and insect and fire damage, and when I lend one out, like I did with my copy of ME by Thomas T. Thomas, I may lose it forever.
When Microsoft came out with their e-reader, I bought a few books that I can no longer use because of their arcane validation scheme, same with Mobi format books, but Amazon has made the Kindle device and platform so ubiquitous that I finally have hope that I can maintain a library i can access from anywhere rather than having to carry around books physically or hoping my digital copies don't die with my device.
I don't own a Kindle device, yet. I have the reader installed on my phones and my desktop and I love that I can read anything I have purchased at any time I want. I also love that I, as an author, can make my work available via Kindle, which makes it more readily readable to a wider audience all over the world without me incurring pre-production costs.
For those people who have vowed never to own a digital reader, I was you 30 years ago and I was wrong.
So what prompted this rant? I needed to get copies of some out-of-print favourite books. The cost for one book is over $100 for a paperback edition. I don't want to collect it, I want to read it but now I have to wait for the copyright to lapse before I have any hope of getting a copy and I would much rather pay the author or their estate for a digital copy.
From experience, I know the process to convert to Kindle is fairly painless. I had to clear headings and convert the TOC to links but it was less than 30 minutes work. And now my works are available to the world for a small fee and, what is more, the people who purchase them electronically never have to worry about losing them because they can always download it again from Amazon.
Sure, if Amazon goes out of business, we are screwed, but I'm thinking amazon is not a bad risk based on their track record.
Me, I'll take that risk.
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Re: Pages do not a novel make, nor printed words a book |
By Magics on
5/27/2011 |
Hey friend put a request for you at the site.
Hope all is well and miss your presence there. Had no way to contact you so found you here:) |
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Re: Pages do not a novel make, nor printed words a book |
By Pugilist on
5/27/2011 |
Mona,
I left neopoet a bit over a month ago. The direction the site is trending is not a direction I care to travel and should I want that much drama in my life, I shall get married again.
But I wish you folks well. |
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Re: Pages do not a novel make, nor printed words a book |
By Kate Jones on
6/29/2011 |
| Your writiing and personality are most entertaining. Do you ever do stand-up comedy with hecklers who need putting down? This is just to introduce myself. I'm actually commenting about the line at the top of your page that says "Your are @ Home" -- "YOUR"??? Very strange on a site with such perfect spelling and grammar... Or are you just trying to snag the occasional obsessive/compulsive proofreader? Then it worked. |
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Re: Pages do not a novel make, nor printed words a book |
By Pugilist on
6/29/2011 |
Kate,
Being mildly dyslexic, I make many silly, and sometimes hilarious, errors with spelling and word confusion but, happily, this is not one of them. This I can rightly blame on the Dot Net Nuke software.
But I appreciate your observation because as much as a grammar adherent as i am, I have completely missed that error in the software for years now.
as far as stand up goes, I do street comedy and hecklers and I have a hate/love relationship. They hate me, I love them because hecklers are free ideas and people love nothing better than seeing their friends mocked and, as a mockfessional, I can normally do it in a way that is not hurtful but still entertaining.
And, if all else fails, I can laugh at the situation because while I take what I do seriously, I mine my experiences for as much humour as possibly and I am always the most frequent target of my jibes.
Thanks for stopping by. |
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