2. How excited am I about Kresley Cole’s release of the first novella in the IAD series?? Excited enough that I have now purchased (and read 1/2 of) the first book for my laptop!

I have homework to do, and here I am reading this fabulous book, instead!

Like a character in a Stephanie Meyer fantasy, the e-book drains the blood from the physical text. No, this cultural revolution can’t be recommended.

What planet is he on? If his books aren’t available as ebooks then I won’t be buying any, LOL!

I love reading, I want a good story, whether it be on paper or on my screen. I have been buying and reading more ebooks lately with a few trips to the library in between for my paper versions. Paper books take up too much room at the moment; we have overflowing bookcases and we just don’t have the physical room to keep adding to them.

I’ll support a new writer more who has an ebook than a new one who has a booksigning in WH Smith’s or wherever.

take care,
Annette

Author Andrew Keen is resistant to the ebook shift because he finds ebooks soulless and predicts that ebooks will make authors soulless too.

Well, then. He’d better give up his computer and start using a manual typewriter because, you know, the sounds of keys clacking are what makes writing soooo soulful. And printers will have to dump the offset printing for the return of the movable type.

Nay! Not the movable type, it should be woodblock printing. OK, it might take roughly three or four years to produce each copy of a 400-page novel through the woodblock printing process, but hey, it’s what makes it soulful, mon.

Actually, perhaps the author should dump his manual typewriter, forget the longhand crap, and opt for a hardcore method: finger-painting his stories on a wall in a den of lions or something bitey at a zoo.

This would make him be so like the Great Ones who finger-painted their stories on some rock walls while somewhere in the background behind them, a few mammoths and dinosaurs* flapped their paws at each other. That surely would put capital S in soulful.

Please, give me a bloody break. What matters is whether he could convey the “soul” of his writing to his readers, regardless of its medium. Radio, TV, ebook, graffiti on a wall, hardback, paperback, toilet roll (hey, Koji Suzuki did it), butcher paper (hey, Jack Kerouac did it!), fax paper (hey, Hunter S. Thompson did it!), needlework (hey, Lady Jane Grey did it!), a 40-pence notebook, a rock wall, or whatever it takes. That’s what writing is about, not the bloody “Ooh, sexyyyy!” fingering of a (possibly traumatised) print book.

Sorry that it’s such a long silly rant, but stupidity tends to drag the irrationally cranky cow out of me.

*Hollywood version of history

etailers like Fictionwise and WH Smith are being forced to remove access to books that people have already bought because of geographical restrictions.

Repeating what one of the commenters said in the linked blog post: Thanks to the internet, the audience is worldwide, but the publishing rights still are limited by country. Could everybody somehow propel themselves into the 21st century, please? It’s only 2009 — you can totally catch up on what’s what’s happened so far!

This sort of thing results in two actions: 1) piracy and 2) decline in adoption of ebook reading.

If you heard a thud, that was my head banging my desk.

I could describe myself as a reluctant print reader. Sort out all the crap regarding geographical restrictions, overpriced ebooks, incompatible formats, etc., and I’d definitely jump on the digital bandwagon. I’m not clinging to print out out of a particular affection for books or their history, although that also has its place. It just seems that every other week there’s yet another compelling reason for me NOT to go the ebook route.

At this point, I think I need to not read up on ebooks and ereaders for a bit. It frustrates me too much.