Welcome to Monday Update, yet again, talking about whatever comes up in the recesses of my addled brain onto the Internet. Or maybe I write these way further in advance than you think. You decide.
Kindle – No, I don’t have hands that beautiful, but I do own a Kindle.
I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. To get all philosophical on you, I enjoy the sense of touch, the weird smells, and the ontological status of a book as a physical object. There’s something WRONG about having dozens upon dozens of book squashed into a tiny little device. They feel worthless, infinitessimal, and ephermeral. That doesn’t mean you won’t read them, of course; but there’s a big different between turning a page, seeing how far you’ve ventured into a particular text, and pressing a button to move ahead. Obviously, the intangible nature of my complaint makes me sound like a old man pining for the non-existent “good old days” or making a mountain out of a mole-hill.
One thing I find as a positive, however, comes from the HUGE variety of free eBooks out there. You don’t even have to break copyright laws – as far as I know, any work published before 1922 has a permanently expired copyright, meaning the original publisher cannot renew said copyright. That’s a boon for anyone who loves reading such books. No more must you contend with used book stores and overpriced classics at Barmes and Noble; just download the book you want. Furthermore, many books that don’t appear on shelves find themselves in the eBook format. To wit: it’s nice to find copies of John Milton’s prose works. In addition to being one of the greatest poets of the 17th century, he was a staunch Calvinist, theologian, and legal theorist – to find those essential texts warms my heart, and I’m happy to have them. As well, such old rare books come from academic presses, meaning you’ll pay much, much more than anyone should pay for such a text. Now, if there’s a copy of that same book (pre-1922, of course), you can find that book with no problems. It’s amazing how many free books lay right on Amazon’s own site…as if they didn’t want you to pay for those books. Finding entirely new authors and genres comes naturally in the insatiable search for new texts to jam into that memory.
Now, there’s always a few problems in these ventures, and eBooks still remain no exception. It supports a number of formats, but you’ll want to convert most to MOBI format for ease of use. Amazon doesn’t stock every book; you’ll need to search the far corners of the Internet to find many of these books. Thus, conversion to MOBI from some other bizarre format comes as a necessity if you love free books (read: I love free books). To add to this, if gigantic works of literature ring your bell, good luck sorting through said books – these conversions don’t create a table of contents by default. This, in fact, seems to point to the dollar versions of free anthologies – much easier to navigate, and you only pay a dollar for works that are free! Hey, if I knew how to insert such a table, I would! Since the complete works of Jonathan Edwards, coming in at some absurd page count, has no table in my copy, I’m seriously tempted to buy it so I can even navigate this behemoth. Same goes for the essays of Michel de Montaigne. I feel a little dirty and a bit gouged due to my ignorance of the formatting file-types.
Still, the whole process, for me, became a fun adventure. I would never buy such a thing for myself; my brother had to foist the device upon me before I’d even consider using it. Then, finding out all of the various quirks, oddities, and good times described above came as a natural result of my desire to completely understand everything. Also, it satiates my avarice of material goods without adding extra bulk. You see, it inspires a benign kleptomania. Oh, that book’s free! Do I have a remote interesting in the subject matter? Sure, why not? It’s only a click! Hey, I just saw John Carter – why not read the rest of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series? Oh, why not slap some Dickens in there, even though I hate his writing style? Chesterton’s one of my favorites (even though everyone seems to think he’s an anti-Semite. I’d say he’s a wittier C.S. Lewis of the 19th century), so download everything he ever wrote about anything. How about everything H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote? Absolutely, let’s do this! Will I read any of this, or have the time to read any of it, or just stop doing everything else and read these books? Well, that’s a totally different question, isn’t it?
That’s why people have far too many books on their Kindles – it’s the same phenomenon that the MP3 format caused a decade ago. It removes the value of create works (and creates a whole pirating ring where no one can be tracked or traced), but those same works become prolific and accessible from the get-go. Thus, there’s a positive and a negative trend to the whole process. I’m interested to see whether eBooks completely eliminate regular books (the horror, the horror!) or whether physical books remain in our consciousness for a long time to come (they’re not even made of paper for the most part…or maybe that was the United States currency, guess my facts got mixed up somewhere).
Either way, for a 69.99 USD device, I’ve been having way more fun than a search for old books should ever come close to being. “Pokemon for Book Nerds” – that’s a slogan I could get behind (if the word Pokemon wasn’t copyrighted in every way, shape, and form six ways to Sunday). Also, did I mention free Bibles? Yes, I just did. I still like real books, but Kindle fulfills other needs. I guess you could also use it for GameFAQs guides in the palm of your hand as well. I haven’t done that yet, but I certainly will!
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That’s it for Monday Update and me talking entirely too much about books. Cya tomorrow for…something.
