Kindle-ing 2

I have now read several different books on my Kindle and I have to say that I like it. I know a lot of people are saying that you lose the tactile feedback, the satisfaction, the overall experience of reading when you use an electronic reader. To an extent, they are correct. You don't feel the cover; you don't turn the page; you can't smell the ink, or the cover or the paper, all of those things are missing.

Also missing, however, is the weight, the arm cramps, the skipped pages, fumbling to get just one page to turn, the bulk, the thumb cramps, and all the other physical things that make reading uncomfortable. To be fair, I am comparing to a 800+ page hard-bound book, a smaller paperback isn't quite as bad.

OK, those are the bad things. The loss of the physical presence of the book. Now on to the things I liked about the Kindle and the things I didn't like.

The Kindle's display is very good. I had no more eyestrain reading on the Kindle than I do with a real book. The whole "staring at a screen" thing simply is not an issue. Being able to adjust the font size is nice, especially if you are a bit more experienced at life than others, like me, and if your are more than a little tired, like when you're on the back end of a 12 hours international flight like I was.

The page turning mechanism is OK, not great, and not horrible. The big button on both sides of the Kindle advance the page, and the little button turns pages back. It takes a bit to get used to the buttons for two reasons. First, I had a tendency to use the big button on the right to advance, and when I went too far, I tried to use the big button on the left to go back. This seems more intuitive to me, at least that was my initial thought.

The second reason was that you have to place your hands on the device in the right spot to be able to advance pages. This seemed a bit awkward at first. After using it for a while though, it is apparent that the buttons work well and although each individual is going to want the buttons in a different place, Amazon did as well as can be expected with the button placement. And this is where the logic of the big advance buttons on both sides comes in. You can hold the Kindle with either hand and still easily change pages. You don't have to reach across the device if you are holding it with your left hand. Also, I would often use the hand that I wasn't using to hold the Kindle to advance the page, much like you would with a real book. The cool thing was that I could do that no matter which hand I held the "book" with.

I did run into trouble a few times with accidentally holding down the advance button when I went to lay the Kindle down to answer a phone, or whatever. I'd pick the book back up, and I had no idea what page I was on. I had to thumb back a number of pages, sometimes 10 or more, to find where I was at.

This leads to another drawback of electronic readers. You have no real sense of where you are in a book. With a real book, you can see that you are 1/3rd the way through easily. With a Kindle, they give you a display that shows a strange number system that indicates what line your are on, or something like that, and a percentage. You have to physically look at the percentage and notice it to tell where you are. With a real book, it's done more by feel. This is a small thing overall though. There is definitely an advantage too because as long as you don't fat-finger the advance button like I did, you'll never lose your place because the book closed accidentally or you forgot to put your bookmark in place. The Kindle always remembers, even if you switch to a different book for a while.

I did learn fairly quickly how to hold the device so that it was both comfortable and in an easy position to read. There are several ways I found to hold it that worked well for me. I read in bed both on my side and on my back. I read in my recliner (a lot). I read on the airplane. I didn't have any real difficulties getting comfortable.

The Kindle screen is about the same size as a standard paperback page. I found that I preferred to use a smaller font even if I did have to use my reading glasses. It made it so I didn't have to turn the page as often. And this is the one big advantage a book has over the Kindle. With a book, you only need to turn a page once for every two pages you read. With a Kindle, you have to advance the page once for every page you read. The Kindle makes this fast and easy -- faster than turning a real page -- but this is still a disadvantage and one that won't be fixed any time soon.

OK, so there is the physical stuff. Now lets move one to the important thing, the book -- the story. Amazingly, the story was really good and I completely ignored the fact that I was not reading in a printed book. It was just a story that I was reading. The story is the real product here, not the presentation method. The Kindle did not make the story any better, or any worse than it would have been in a printed book. I finished the book completely satisfied -- well, I did miss that satisfying "thunk" when I closed the book for the last time, I will admit to that. But, that's OK.

I do have an opinion about the whole "experience" discussion. People learn to like things because of the good experiences they have with them. What people have to understand is that the good experience from reading comes from the story, not the book. They associate the physical book with that good experience and so are disturbed by the idea that they're not reading a book anymore, they're reading on a device. My opinion is: get over it. Read the story, love the story. You might find that you start to get all warm and fuzzy every time you look at your Kindle. I do.

Kindle-ing

I bought a Kindle this week. It wasn't something I was planning on doing for a while, but circumstances dictated the timing. OK, so it wasn't that critical, but I was able to rationalize it. I bought Brandon Sanderson's new book, The Way of Kings. It arrived last week and when I opened the box, my heart sank. This book is HUGE. My plan was to take it with my on my trip to Germany. Me and 12 hour plane rides don't get along well and a really good book helps ever so much. But this book, well, it was HUGE, I'm not sure it could be classified as a carry-on; it's more like check baggage.

So, what's a man to do? Well, buy a Kindle of course. So, I ordered one from Amazon. One of the good things about living in the PNW, is that Amazon shipments usually get to my house in a day or two even if I pick the free super saver shipping. I checked my order status yesterday and my Kindle was sitting wedged between my screen door and my pathetically dirty front door at my house. I was stuck at work until after 7pm. It was really frustrating.

When I finally got home, I forced myself to go change into my comfy house clothes and then tore into the box. The first thing I noticed is that they had one of those peal-off screen protectors on the front. I carefully pealed it off. But the image on the screen was still there. Eh? I felt around for another peal off screen protector that had the image on it, but there was nothing there. Then I thought the unit had been on when it was shipped. Nope. That's just the way the screen works.

The Kindle screen does not work like a computer or cell phone screen. It only takes power to change the text or image on the screen, then it's basically like paper. I like to think of it as an Etch-a-Sketch. The screen draws what it needs to draw and once it's done, that image is there forever without needing any more power to stay there. Cool! It's the reason the Kindle can claim the 30 day battery life. It only uses power when you flip pages while reading, basically. There is no backlight or anything like that so, like a real book, you have to have some form of external light to use it. The WiFi will eat up power if you leave it on, but you can easily turn it off when you don't need it.

Every time the Kindle is turned off, a new image is drawn on the screen. Right now, I have a picture of Alexandre Dumas staring at me. Earlier it was Mark Twain and after him was Agatha Christie. The "screen saver" image is chosen by the device and is mostly literary figures and often book covers. It's all in black and white, but the most impressive thing is that these images look just like a printed photo or drawing. I must have turned the unit on then off again a dozen times just to see what new image would come up. Very cool.

I've only read about 30 pages with it so far, so I'm not ready to make a full evaluation of it. So far, I like it. It is easy to use and Amazon makes it very easy to download books -- maybe too easy. When you select a book to view in the store, the BUY button is highlighted. If you mash the enter button on the keypad, you've just bought the book. There's no "are you sure" prompt, or any other confirmation. You've just bought the book. It's more dangerous because in order to navigate away from the BUY button, you have to use the tiny arrow keys that surround the enter button. Place your thumbnail a little wrong, and you've just bought a book. Amazon should really fix this. It's unfair to expect a person to buy a book with one button press with no confirmation prompt.

So, I'll update the blog later on when I've had a chance to read a few books on the Kindle. I'll have ample time on those two 12 hours flight legs on the trip to Cologne.

Getting Started -- you must start before you can get lost.

I am new to the world of writing. I've been a reader all my life, but that doesn't make one qualified to be a writer. I'm finding it a difficult world with many traps and perils. OK, not really, but writing isn't easy.

The majority of people in the world can read and most of them can write. So, writing is one of those low barriers to entry markets, right? Well, no. Sure, anybody can pound out some words that might happen to form a coherent sentence, but that doesn't make them a writer. It only makes them human. I'm not yet sure I can hack it as a writer, but that's what I'm aiming for.

I write fiction. My favorite form of fiction is Fantasy and Science Fiction so that is what I am writing. I've written a few short peices that are more literature oriented, but that's not really where my passion is. I have two ideas that I'm currently working on. One is pretty complex and requires a lot of world building, complex political machinations, cultural diversity, and of course swords and magic. So, it's a tough one to start on. I've written about 70k words on it so far but I'm afraid most of it won't be usable. That's OK, it's a learning process. The second idea is much more simple and easier to develop. I'm excited about it. Not because it is original, it's not. But I like the idea, I like the characters and I think I can actually tell the whole story.

The purpose of this blog is not to extole my virtues as a writer, nor is it to arrogantly try to promote myself. It is also not a blog about teaching you how to write. So many writers have their own blogs where they try to teach people how to write. Some of them are excellent. Most of them are pretty dull and proves that one can be a great writer, but a lousy teacher. No, what I'm aiming for here is simply to post what interests me and to possibly point out things from the writing world that are worthy of some consideration. I'll rant, I'll opine, and sometimes I'll even make sense. But I am no expert and I reserve the right to contradict myself at will.

I doubt I'll post here regularly, but we'll see. I might enjoy it.

I hope, if you are reading this, that you get something of value out of it.

Eric