Purely Businesslike

[rinue]

Continued: my gradual process of unpacking. Everything still a shambles.

Purchased: a Kindle, by Ciro. Neither of us is remotely impressed with the iPad, but e-ink is like magic. It's a mesmerizing piece of technology. I still don't use it -- you may recall my long history of prefering constraints to options -- but I like to look at it when Ciro uses it. This was bought partially because we're interested in the Kindle as a distribution system and thought we should do further research.

Thanksgiving: attended by Kristina and C. Blacker as well as the six members of the family in residence. Lots of food, lots of alcohol, everyone cooking, lots of singing. Screened a number of my films, as requested, and The Fall, because I am an eternal booster for The Fall.

Heard from: Kenyon Review, an unsurprising form rejection, and Apex, neither a rejection nor an acceptance but sort of fanmail to say "we are still looking at this and like it."

Have packed various packages to be mailed, and made various medical and dental appointments for the new year.

Comments

[valancy_jane]

I am fascinated by the Kindle, quite torn, really. I prefer paper books myself, but love a lack of clutter, and C's allergies make me even further inclined to get rid of any kind of clutter so as to make dusting easier. (No dust mites in NM, but fur, skin, mold etc. easier to daub up, all of which resides in dust, and which he is increasingly hideously allergic to. He's in the top tier of allergic people now.) I also love the idea of not packing so many books on work trips, yet I think it would make me kind of soul-sick not to go to Borders or B&N now and again. And can you back that material up? But don't you get classics free? AGH!!!! SO torn. Must send me further review once have had chance to investigate.

[rinue]

I am still a paper books person, because I tend to flip back and forth a lot and also find it easier to remember things I read if I have the tactile sense of flipping pages, or if the object in which I read the thing is on my shelf. Often I don't remember a fact, but I do remember what page it's on, for instance.

However, the Kindle really is well handled. Amazon archives everything you buy so if your Kindle crashes you can re-download everything for free. Ciro got the model that has eternal free 3G coverage as well, so basically he can also search the internet from anywhere for free. And you can add, effectively, sticky notes or footnotes to what you read, and you can go back and look at your notes and use those notes to go back to the page where you made that note, sort of like a combination of being able to write in the margins and add tabs, which seems awfully handy with nonfiction. I suspect you would like it a lot, although I don't think it's likely to replace your books.

Another interesting thing is that you can still loan books to other people who have Kindles; basically you set an amount of time during which it disappears from your Kindle and is available from theirs, and then after that time it comes back to you unless you tell it to stay with that person. Which I think is fairly clever.

[valancy_jane]

OMG.

0_0

That's just...dangerously awesome.

[bevjunior]

It is in fact possible for me to achieve distribution on Kindle through Createspace however the technical formatting requirements are trixie and make little sense to me so I have not pursued that channel though probably I should. P.S. I am working on my next collection. It will be a little different and it will need to be curated by a small army of friends and collaborators most especially you and Ciro.

[rinue]

Well, you know we're on board.

[achates.livejournal.com]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed on the Apex thing.