I hate the title for these posts. It has been a while since I did one of these posts and that can be put down to my mind not being in a cooperative mood. This one is shorter than the others, the product of having only one subject to talk about. It is somewhat relevant though. I hoped to do one of these posts a week, but that does not seem to be working out for me. I might try to attempt a few more over the following few weeks though.
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Note: If you expect logical reasoning in the following topic, you are delusional. Thank you for stopping by though.
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E-books
I guess you can call me the old fashion sort, a curmudgeonly fellow, who happens to enjoy the heft, smell, and sight of a book. To gaze upon books stacked haphazardly on every flat surface or shelved properly is simply one of the greatest joys life has to offer for a book lover such as myself. Indeed, my chest swells with pride to view my collection, to know that I worked half-assedly to pay for almost every book therein.
So, it should come as no surprise that when I encounter this odd thing called an e-reader, I test the waters in the only way I know how. A quick sniff sends me reeling away and though I look, I see no pages to turn. And the price! How can I fill my shelves with these electronic books when they cost so much? If the time comes and I am stuck in some freezing wintry hell with nothing more than a chair and my books for firewood (though I would be loathe to lose them in such a manner, I would rather survive, likely ensuring my status as a bibliophile shall be revoked), the e-reader would not come to my rescue. Even if I manage to afford enough to fill my shelves and place upon my flat surfaces, I have the feeling that they will not provide the adequate fuel. The side of me that loves technology pines away from the box I have locked him away inside and only manages a simple, hey, that’s kind of neat, before he is brutally beaten into silence.
All silliness aside, I can see what people like about e-readers. There are no embarrassing covers on display to scare off all the attractive women (or men, because I like to think that occasionally member of the superior sex actually wanders over to this here blog and I want to be fair), a person can carry around their entire collection wherever they go without having to bring along a cart or rental truck, there is no risk of breaking one’s wrists attempting to hold the latest epic fantasy tome aloft, and the books are cheaper, too. All wonderful points, of course, which cater to those who have embraced the tech with open arms and credit cards. However, I would list them all as negative, but then that is what makes an e-reader “not for me”.
This is not to say that I am incapable of viewing the little buggers in a positive light. Though my bookish needs are tended to by the real deal, an e-reader would come in handy for, say, Project Gutenberg. It does not stop there, either. While I do so love holding a book and viewing it on laying about wherever it manages to end up, there is a certain matter of the wallet. If I am going to pay for a book, then it surely must be a real, physical object that I can hold and smell and dance naked with by the firelight under a full moon. There is the matter of free—legal—e-books though and again, this is where an e-reader would come in handy. Unfortunately, this is the extent of my desire to have an e-reader and the extent of my use. At the price they are going for now, I can safely say that it is not worth it.
This is no knock against those who use or prefer the e-reader, of course. The medium in which we prefer to read our books is purely subjective and though I much prefer to have a real book, there is certainly someone on the other side of the card.
And that, the knowledge that there is someone else on the other side of the card, is what makes it hard to view the whole e-book concern with the amount of apathy as I would prefer. I posted earlier this evening about Amazon and the reaction they had towards Macmillan wanting a new pricing plan for e-books. As a person with so little interest in the electronic medium that it may as well be described as none, this is a matter that should not affect me. Yet, in a show of power, Amazon pulled the print and electronic titles for all of Macmillan’s books and thereby affected me—the lowly buyer of non-electronic, tree-killing books. It also affected a good many innocent authors and I find I am a lot more likely to side with the publisher, the authors under said publisher, and my fellow geeky consumers with nothing better to do on a weekend night than buy books, than to side with Amazon over the matter.
I am inclined to leave the matter of e-book pricing to those who care and are affected by it. I fall into neither category and yet when word finally came around that Amazon had given in, I was happy that Macmillan won, though I certainly had no reason to be. I sided with the publisher because of the stunt that Amazon pulled, but, in the end, the decision to go with Macmillan’s pricing plan has no affect on my wallet. At the moment I am left feeling mixed emotions. Happy that Amazon lost and sorry that those folks who prefer e-books will now be paying more for them. Something tells me it will not stop there either. Macmillan won through… which publisher is next?
The Fifth Hundred – The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway
By now, I expect these posts are getting tiresome. I expect this, because I am not tired of writing them. We have moved into the realm of Gee, wasn’t that a bad idea? and I have learned my lesson. However, since I started these posts I feel the need to stick to them until the very end. Thankfully, that will be very soon. The end of this set of hundred pages marks the steep decline to the very end.
As we begin this set, our nameless narrator is tagging along with a carnival run by a diverse and probably quite insane group of folks, all named K. If you see a pattern of our nameless narrator always running into eccentric people instead of nice, normal ones, then you have likely read the book. I am not sure I have included that in any of the previous posts. Anyway, he does. That is one of the best parts of this book. We are treated to one odd, insane, or purely eccentric character after another. And even as we are introduced to new ones, more of the those we have met in the past make a triumphant return in one way or another to join in the fray. Also in this set: ninjas, mutant bees, and more mimes… sometimes in the same scene.
One thing to note is that I mentioned The Twist happening in the last hundred pages. This is both true and false. While part of the twist did indeed happen there, our nameless narrator is not smacked across the face with the revelation until this hundred pages. And a revelation it is, indeed. That, of course, brings me round to digressions. Those people of the anti-digressional minds have either thrown the book away with a scream or become resigned to the fact that they exist and will persist until the bitter end. Well, or it could just be that they are masochists, which is likely. The digressions have returned and they are important, they are mostly an integral part of the story. The epic tale of Crazy Joe Spork, for instance, is not exactly important, but is one of the more entertaining bits and something spawned of a mind that has gone just a bit crazy itself.
Of course, I cannot discount the brilliant exaggerated insanity of the latter part of the set, when our nameless narrator takes it upon himself to become a man of action and head off to Haviland City to find out who set him up and risked destroying the known world to do so.
These posts seem to keep getting shorter. The book, however, is just as good as the first time I read it. The next one of these will likely be up tonight or tomorrow and I expect my post about the twist to come sometime later.