{"id":7759,"date":"2010-06-22T13:08:07","date_gmt":"2010-06-22T17:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=7759"},"modified":"2021-06-19T12:02:09","modified_gmt":"2021-06-19T16:02:09","slug":"buh-bye-book-buying-guilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/buh-bye-book-buying-guilt\/","title":{"rendered":"<em>Buh-Bye, Book-Buying Guilt!<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" title=\"Ready to download!\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/kindleoneclick.jpg?resize=212%2C86&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"212\" height=\"86\" \/>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, &#8220;&#8216;Frugal&#8217; is such an <em>ugly<\/em> word.&#8221; (Ha!)<\/p>\n<p>Like many people, I suppose, I have great ambivalence about acquiring ever more <em>Stuff<\/em>. Examined closely, expressions like <em>Wow, that would be so cool!<\/em> so often seem like merely sublimated versions of <em>I want! I want! I want!<\/em> So I&#8217;ve learned to be suspicious of my own greedy motives, especially when &#8220;wanting&#8221; something which I clearly don&#8217;t <em>need<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>All of that moral second-guessing, I&#8217;m afraid, has gone by the board since I opened my birthday present from The Missus over the weekend: an Amazon <a title=\"Amazon.com: Kindle 2\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation\/dp\/B0015T963C\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kindle 2<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>To dispose of some obvious &#8220;But <em>real<\/em> books are so much better!&#8221; objections first:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;feel&#8221; of a real book &#8212; and the aroma of its pages, and so on &#8212; is nice. I&#8217;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&#8217;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.)<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t buy many books in hardcover. I&#8217;m not going to start suddenly spending more on books now; I&#8217;ll still buy cheaper paperback editions if they&#8217;re available.<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;<em>and<\/em> there are plenty of books whose Kindle versions are free, or cheaper than any print edition.<\/li>\n<li>Yes, I know: Amazon has acted like an utter horse&#8217;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&#8217;d happily pay for &#8212; which means (from both Amazon&#8217;s and the publisher&#8217;s perspective) they may well have lost the sale altogether.<\/li>\n<li>Some time ago, I did <a title=\"Earlier RAMH post: 'Can I Kindleize That Velveteen Rabbit for Ya?'\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/can-i-kindleize-that-velveteen-rabbit-for-ya\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a post<\/a> 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&#8217;s books. Other than word-heavy classics, like the <em>Alice<\/em> books, turning kids&#8217; books into bits for simple display on a screen like the Kindle&#8217;s would be, well, stupid. I don&#8217;t have kids, though, and in any event will continue to covet (and sometimes purchase!) real children&#8217;s books. No net gain or loss here.<\/li>\n<li>Ditto the last bullet for graphic novels and collections of comics like the <em>Calvin &amp; Hobbes<\/em> anthologies.<\/li>\n<li>The kicker, of course, is that I didn&#8217;t have to make the purchase decision myself. I&#8217;d never have spent the money on myself. But wow, as a <em>gift<\/em>&#8230;?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Funny story: a couple weeks ago, Borders offered what I thought to be a killer coupon deal &#8212; 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.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I misinterpreted her sort of sickly smile to mean, like, <em>Oh, John, you shouldn&#8217;t have spent that much, even on sale!<\/em> Little did I know what it <em>really<\/em> connoted: <em>Oh crap. Now he&#8217;s not gonna want to buy any MORE books when he gets the Kindle sitting in my office&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m still figuring the thing out. I&#8217;ve bought exactly one &#8220;real&#8221; book so far (for the record, it&#8217;s Lee Child&#8217;s newest Jack Reacher thriller, <a title=\"Lee Child: '61 Hours'\" href=\"http:\/\/www.leechild.com\/61HRS.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>61 Hours<\/em><\/a>). I <em>have<\/em> downloaded a handful of others &#8212; freebie anthologies, inexpensive &#8220;reprints&#8221; and such &#8212; 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.<\/p>\n<p>But my gosh do I like what I&#8217;ve seen so far. So much that I honestly don&#8217;t feel guilty!<\/p>\n<p>_________________<\/p>\n<p><strong>Note:<\/strong> 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 &#8220;[<em>your first name<\/em>]\u2019s Kindle.&#8221; But this name can be changed, presumably, to anything you like. And &#8212; at least until you change it again &#8212; the &#8220;Buy Now with 1-Click&#8221; button displays the new name in the manner shown in the image.<\/p>\n<p>Over the weekend, after I&#8217;d settled on a name I liked, I mentioned on Twitter and Facebook that I&#8217;d give some kind of insubstantial prize to the first person who identified the reference in the name, <em>The Ape in the Unseen Library<\/em>. The prize I came up with was this: a mention in my first post about the new toy.<\/p>\n<p>So, allow me to introduce you to Associated Press <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">correspondent<\/span> newswoman <em>par excellence<\/em> Janet McConnaughey. She&#8217;s been covering the New Orleans beat at least as long as I&#8217;ve known her &#8212; 20 years now &#8212; since first crossing her path on CompuServe&#8217;s old Literary Forum. (She&#8217;s been a sysop there the whole time.) If you&#8217;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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the AP&#8217;s own <a title=\"AP NewsVine: articles by Janet McConnaughey\" href=\"http:\/\/ap-1468.newsvine.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NewsVine<\/a> site (not 100% up to date, go figure); and<\/li>\n<li>the <a title=\"Daylife: articles by Janet McConnaughey\" href=\"http:\/\/labs.daylife.com\/journalist\/janet_mcconnaughey\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">list of articles<\/a> by Janet at the Daylife news-aggregation site.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Interested in the answer to the riddle, by the way? See <a title=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/wiki.lspace.org\/mediawiki\/Librarian\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this entry<\/a> at the Discworld and (Terry) Pratchett Wiki.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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, &#8220;&#8216;Frugal&#8217; is such an ugly word.&#8221; (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! [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,16,247,223,17,36,42,324,1905],"tags":[33,278,336,1854,1855,1856,1857],"class_list":{"0":"post-7759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-themissus","8":"category-ruminations","9":"category-books-as-books","10":"category-04_technology","11":"category-reading","12":"category-ebooks-etc","13":"category-researchresources","14":"category-my-kindle","15":"tag-e-books","16":"tag-graphic-novels","17":"tag-childrens-books","18":"tag-kindle","19":"tag-amazon","20":"tag-lee-child","21":"tag-e-readers","22":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-219","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7759"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24699,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7759\/revisions\/24699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}