Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Bad Things About Living in Wilderness...

A power failure took out thousands of homes last night, and even when the power returned, my Internet service did not.  I was going to buy a Kindle last night to see if gray scaling these pictures improved how they looked, but that was a complete loss of an evening.  I hate to spend the money, partly because I am cheap, and partly because I am not thrilled with the Kindle's user interface.  If only there were a Kindle rental shop--a place you could rent one for a few weeks for a fraction of the cost of buying one.  But I can see why that might not work, and perhaps I just need to bite the bullet and buy one--I expect to do more books this way.

UPDATE: One reader suggested buying a Nook instead (which is a more open platform, sold by Barnes & Noble).  I may well do that.  I am not buying the Kindle because I prefer reading books that way--I do not--but because I need it to verify the final version that I put up on the Kindle site.  I suspect that I will probably only write books in this format in the future, since increasingly, it appears that to get a book published by a trade publisher it better be in one of the following categories:

1. You are nationally famous or infamous.

2. It is "soon to be made into a major Hollywood movie."

3. It has a gay theme.  Seriously: when I was out looking for an agent, I was surprised at how many agents were really interested in books with a gay theme.  My agent tells me that yes, indeed, it is because gay people read and buy books in numbers greatly disproportionate to their numbers.  I already know that books about gun history certainly aren't a way to sell books!

7 comments:

  1. Then don't buy a Kindle. Buy a Nook instead.

    Nook supports non-proprietary formats (.epub, .pdf). I can transfer non-B&N ebooks to the Nook. B&N has never deleted purchased books from users' devices.

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  2. Funny, there's an ad for Kindle on Amazon just to the right of the post. I've been interested in some kind of E reader myself. I may have to borrow from a few friends to find the type I like.

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  3. Get the Kindle appfor your computer. It should be pretty close to how the real Kindle looks, no?

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  4. The Kindle for PC app is close, but not identical. There are minor formatting differences, such as indenting on block quotes, that are not the same.

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  5. mariner: Conversion tools or jailbreak hacks let a Kindle do that, too.

    If Clayton wants to see how his book looks on a Kindle, he kinda needs an actual Kindle available.

    (Me, I've never seen a need for ePub or PDF on mine, but YMMV.

    Certainly in the eBook realm, I've never had a problem finding Mobi or .prc files which the Kindle reads natively.

    In practice, MobiPocket is "open" enough as a format.

    Not that there's anything wrong with the new Nook [unless you need non-Wifi networking], mind. The touchscreen eInk display is clearly The Way Of The Future.)

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  6. Oh, also, Clayton - consider a used Kindle?

    Local pawn or used-electronics shops, or eBay, should provide a significant discount over New.

    I see a $75 Kindle 2 on eBay right now, in fact (as well as a lot of ridiculously overpriced ones...)

    For your "testing my books" need, it should be perfectly adequate and then some; the display on the 2 and the 3 is basically identical.

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  7. I looked at buying a used one on eBay, but it looked like only about $50 savings at most over buying new, and then there is the time issue. I should have my new one on Monday. I am interested in getting this book ready and available for sale by mid-August--no room for delay.

    From what I have read, the Kindle 3 has more levels of gray available--of some importance when you include pictures.

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