The Missus has a refrigerator magnet which features a head-and-shoulders hand-tinted photo of a wealthy, hoity-toity society-matron sort of woman; the text alongside says, “‘Frugal’ is such an ugly word.” (Ha!)
Like many people, I suppose, I have great ambivalence about acquiring ever more Stuff. Examined closely, expressions like Wow, that would be so cool! so often seem like merely sublimated versions of I want! I want! I want! So I’ve learned to be suspicious of my own greedy motives, especially when “wanting” something which I clearly don’t need.
All of that moral second-guessing, I’m afraid, has gone by the board since I opened my birthday present from The Missus over the weekend: an Amazon Kindle 2.
To dispose of some obvious “But real books are so much better!” objections first:
- I take showers, not baths. So reading in the tub has never held any appeal for me, and thus I never need worry about dropping my reading material in the suds.
- The “feel” of a real book — and the aroma of its pages, and so on — is nice. I’d dearly love to again hold in my hands a copy of any number of childhood-favorite books. But the main thing for me is what’s in the book, not its form. (And wrapping the Kindle in a nice cover gives it a physical feel much better than most books, for my taste.)
- I don’t buy many books in hardcover. I’m not going to start suddenly spending more on books now; I’ll still buy cheaper paperback editions if they’re available.
- …and there are plenty of books whose Kindle versions are free, or cheaper than any print edition.
- Yes, I know: Amazon has acted like an utter horse’s ass in strong-arming publishers about Kindle editions, and their pricing. And I know that means I may never see Kindle editions of some books I’d happily pay for — which means (from both Amazon’s and the publisher’s perspective) they may well have lost the sale altogether.
- Some time ago, I did a post here which pointed out what I think is still and may always be a fatal problem with ebooks: their complete inability to recreate the multi-sensory experience of children’s books. Other than word-heavy classics, like the Alice books, turning kids’ books into bits for simple display on a screen like the Kindle’s would be, well, stupid. I don’t have kids, though, and in any event will continue to covet (and sometimes purchase!) real children’s books. No net gain or loss here.
- Ditto the last bullet for graphic novels and collections of comics like the Calvin & Hobbes anthologies.
- The kicker, of course, is that I didn’t have to make the purchase decision myself. I’d never have spent the money on myself. But wow, as a gift…?
Funny story: a couple weeks ago, Borders offered what I thought to be a killer coupon deal — 25% off everything you bought, during one shopping trip (to a real store, or borders.com) over the course of a couple days. At any rate, it was a good enough deal that I hastened to their online site and scooped up something like five or six books. Later that day, I told The Missus about my visit.
Of course, I misinterpreted her sort of sickly smile to mean, like, Oh, John, you shouldn’t have spent that much, even on sale! Little did I know what it really connoted: Oh crap. Now he’s not gonna want to buy any MORE books when he gets the Kindle sitting in my office…
I’m still figuring the thing out. I’ve bought exactly one “real” book so far (for the record, it’s Lee Child’s newest Jack Reacher thriller, 61 Hours). I have downloaded a handful of others — freebie anthologies, inexpensive “reprints” and such — as well as free-sample first chapters of books I might consider buying later. As I call up the on-screen menu in various contexts, I continue to see options I know vaguely about (like bookmarks and notes), will probably come to appreciate, but have not yet used.
But my gosh do I like what I’ve seen so far. So much that I honestly don’t feel guilty!
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Note: The little image at the top of this post is a partial screen capture from the Amazon site, which I snagged just yesterday. When you first get a Kindle, you register it with Amazon so it can sync up with your account and, by default, the device is then named “[your first name]’s Kindle.” But this name can be changed, presumably, to anything you like. And — at least until you change it again — the “Buy Now with 1-Click” button displays the new name in the manner shown in the image.
Over the weekend, after I’d settled on a name I liked, I mentioned on Twitter and Facebook that I’d give some kind of insubstantial prize to the first person who identified the reference in the name, The Ape in the Unseen Library. The prize I came up with was this: a mention in my first post about the new toy.
So, allow me to introduce you to Associated Press correspondent newswoman par excellence Janet McConnaughey. She’s been covering the New Orleans beat at least as long as I’ve known her — 20 years now — since first crossing her path on CompuServe’s old Literary Forum. (She’s been a sysop there the whole time.) If you’d like to read some of her handiwork, which of late (for obvious reasons) focuses on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I direct your attention to these resources:
- the AP’s own NewsVine site (not 100% up to date, go figure); and
- the list of articles by Janet at the Daylife news-aggregation site.
(Interested in the answer to the riddle, by the way? See this entry at the Discworld and (Terry) Pratchett Wiki.)
well hey. i can think of some tasty ebooks for you to read :)
word ver: “be caboose.” your blog seems to realize i will be the last person in the world to get around to buying an ereader.
moonie: I was wondering about stuff like reviewers’ copies. It’d certainly be cheaper (and easier? dunno) for publishers to send around e-books than the dead-trees versions. I don’t know the mechanics of sending someone a DRM-protected Kindle book, though — or even if it’s possible.
You’ve blogged/tweeted/etc. much about your reading and book-buying habits; based on what I know from those sources, I feel pretty confident that you, too, will love your first e-reader, Kindle or otherwise! (Especially if you can write off all book purchases as, like, “competitive research” expenses, heh.)
Aw, shucks. :) Thanks, John!
I should probably note, just for somethingorother’s sake, that in the AP, “correspondent” is the title for someone a level up from me — the top person in a semi-autonomous office. So, for instance, our Main Person in Baton Rouge, Melinda Deslatte, is a correspondent who answers to the New Orleans bureau chief. My official title is “Newswoman.” :)
Congrats to the lucky winner! And to you for the birthday and WIN gift! Woo!
Good-bye guilt, hello reading of the future. :)
Janet: Well, I corrected the job title. But I gotta say, it felt awfully unnatural. Does the AP Style Book actually recommend constructions like “anchorwoman”???
Darc: Thank you for the congrats!
Me, I usually say I’m a reporter. :)
I wasn’t sure how I felt about e-readers, but then I held a friend’s iPad. I could read a book on that for sure.
Congrats on the Kindle. A lovely present on many levels. And just about anything that helps reading and opens the world to more books, is a good thing.
Congratulations, John. Well may you read.
I must have been off Facebook and Twitter on the day you launched your competition, but I am not so familiar with Terry Pratchett’s work anyway. (However he is on my wish list for when I start buying books again.)
I’m all for e-readers, but I suspect I will still want to buy books too. They’re part of the furniture for me, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy being able to access a book anywhere, anytime, rather than sit around sucking my thumb at dentist appointments etc. because I left my current book on the hall table (which happens more times than I care to count, these days.)
The main attraction of an e-reader for me is the ability to subscribe to my favourite magazines. I am a magazine freak, with about 15 weekly/monthly subscriptions. I can’t wait to cancel them all, and re-subscribe to their e-editions. It will be so nice to lose all that paper I have to trash, and to save rather than cut out and store the articles I want to keep.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Apple geek and proud of it, I’m holding out for an iPad, but, possibly for the first time ever, I’m waiting until the teething bugs are fixed before buying one (and it’s killing me, btw).
Janet: When I was talking about it to The Missus, we both thought of “reporter”… But it seemed so obvious, we figured it must be some sort of AP-specific jargon term indicating (as you point out “correspondent” does) a specific job title or hierarchical rank.
marta: I read a lot of book series — the Pratchett books, obviously; Lee Child’s Reacher thrillers; Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child’s Pendergast mysteries; Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum titles; etc., etc. For recreational reading, I try to alternate a series book with a “real” book and in general this works out pretty good. One downside: I’ve got a LOT of mass-market paperbacks which I’ll almost certainly read only once. If The Missus also reads the series (Evanovich, Preston/Child), having the book on hand makes sense. But if it’s just me?
I just learned that the Kindle pricing on Pratchett’s Discworld series seems to match the mass-market paperback pricing penny-for-penny. This makes it a no-brainer for me, for his stuff!
Tessa: The idea of replacing hardcopy magazine subscriptions with their e-versions is fabulous. I too am a magazine junkie — not at your level, though (currently maybe 4-5 subscriptions, the weekly New Yorker and the rest monthly). Of course, the magazine’s gotta HAVE an e-version, which not all of them do. And it would help if they all agreed to charge no more for the e-version than the dead-trees counterpart…
A fly in the e-ointment for me is that I collect New Yorker covers. Well, “collect” dances around the truth, makes it sound as though I select the best and perhaps frame them. Not 100% the case: I simply KEEP them. At any one time, our house probably has a dozen issues squirreled away somewhere, undiscarded simply because I haven’t gotten around to tearing the cover off and filing it away.
I have two long-time Apple geeks in my family. Neither has an iPad yet. One is actually an employee, and from that you might guess that the other might be angling for some, y’know, inside scoops — employee discounts and so on. But as I understand it, at least at the moment, the iPad is not discounted anywhere, even to its employees. I’d wait, too!