Hey all,
Admitedly this is a club devoted to talking about books, but this little infopost leads well into one of the books I wanted to talk about. Recently, I have made a move from physical books to ebooks. It may seem like a treacherous moves, but I will tell you something that may shock you. Both Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell and The Magicians, are two of the six or so books I have recently purchased and read on my iphone as ebooks.
What? I hear you exclaim am I supporting the erosion of literature and the destruction of the book as we know it. Well no not really. I have come to realise that ebooks have their place and there are certain really cool things about the current ebook climate that I think you as readers of Fantasy will appreciate.
Now the first thing which I'll admit I don't know is about dedicated ereaders. My advice is it's probably a better investment to purchase (for free) the Kindle, Scribd, Ibooks or whatever ereader device you want on an ipad, iphone or other similiar tablet device. The idea of buying a dedicated ereader, seems slightly perverse to me when you can buy other tablet devices which can do what an ereader can do and more. As far as selection goes, ibooks sucks in my experience, I know that Kindle has over 713,000 titles. So a lot of what I'll be saying is about the Kindle, seeing is that is my current ereader of choice.
Something cool about ebooks is that there are some indie ebooks that you won't find anywhere else. These are selfpublished books that you can get for a couple of bucks, I bought one for $1. That's another thing with Kindle books they are ridiculously cheap and I know there are plenty of other sites on the internet such as Scribd and indie author sites where you can download and read ebooks for free. So ereading is significantly cheaper all round.
Anyway back to the indie book thing. Now this for me is one of the coolest things. I recently read a book "A Hard Day's Knight" which was a selfpublished ebook. In order to selfpublish an ebook, all you need is software or a company to prepare your document into ebook format and then its a simple matter of uploading it onto kindle. There are no gate keepers in the ebook publishing world, it's certaintly a solid plan B for upcoming authors its just getting publicitiy that then becomes the issue. But there are literally thousands of these books going between 1-3 bucks on Kindle alone and thousands more elsewhere on the web. While I admit the writing was not as polished in the ebook, the book I read had a unique quality to it. Its absurdity and popcorn value was amazing in spite of the writing itself so there is gold to be had in the ebook realm you can't find anyone else.
I spoke to a friend about her love of having second hand books. She told me she loved seeing things people underlined in their books. I thought this was odd, people actually underline stuff? Really? Now this is something you think you wouldn't have in a kindle ebook. You would be wrong. Every Kindle Ebook I've read so far have had popular quotes underlined, and it is interesting that sense of community with ebooks. Most ebooks as well will list in an extras section what books influenced them and what they were based on. Of course on the amazon store where you buy your ebooks, you'll also find reviews. These are all pretty vital things when finding your next read, but I suppose that is just the eworld not necessarily ebooks. Still it is cool to know that 41 people enjoyed those same few lines that you did.
The last great thing about ebooks is this. For a guy who lives in a more remote area...not really, although people living in the CBD or near it in Sydney would think Penrith is the middle of nowhere, it is hard to find certain titles. In the fantasy section in particular, we are restricted to the most popular and mainstream books, hence the rows upon rows of "paranormal" teen Vampire novels, above and beyond anything else. On my Kindle, it's simple a matter of searching for the book and regardless of the fact I'm in Penrith Australia or anywhere in the world for that matter, I can have the book I want in a second. You cannot beat that sort of convenience at the lower price. It is great to be reading about an interesting book one second and in the next be flicking through that book's first page.
But you know what annoys me. I've been reading all these great book recently, but i can't share them. Growing up in a big family, I love that when my brother gets a book, I also get a book. That is I know I can walk into his room and grab that book off the shelf, but I can't do that with the ebooks I have on my iphone. I'd say that perhaps this is where a separate ereader might be preferable to loan to someone else, but I think in terms of sharing books nothing beats the hard copy. It sucks not being able to foist these novels on my unsuspecting family, but by the same token ebooks have their charm.
Books will always look better on the shelf lets face it and I will cry the day that everyone has a single box in their living room with all their books stored on it. That will be a truly tragic day. Even so Ebooks have their place and I hope anyone reluctant about the changing nature of books, might actually consider ebooks are actually okay. Come on give those poor old indie authors a chance!
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