C.N.Pitts
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I Love AR
Posts: 29
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Vaguely back on topic, I hope this works for you. :)
Me personally, I don't think I could do it. I despise Kindle with every fibre of my being and I will never allow a single word I have ever written to be published in Kindle format or in any other e-book form. Kindle is the single worst thing to happen to human culture, ever. On par with the holocaust, if not worse.
I know, I make it sound evil, rantrantrant. It is. Kindle is my biggest pet peeve. The written word is one of the few truly amazing accomplishments in all of human history, and the use of them to tell stories that can be shared is one of the few examples of true magic. Ancient peoples spent years carving their stories into stone, and to this day they can still be read. To commit your soul and imagination to a format that is nothing more than ghost fart...
Bear in mind, nothing on Kindle actually exists. Anywhere. They make it out like it's so modern and cool... one reader, you can have 35,000 books on it, yadayadayada...
You can buy a used paperback for a buck, somewhere within 20 miles of your home. For your dollar, you get an actual, physical object, a human construct with real words on it, a story that someone was compelled to tell, that you can read, enjoy, carry in your pocket, take to the beach, stick in a box for 50 years, riffle the paper under your nose to enjoy the smell (I absolutely LOVE the smell of old paperbacks), and then enjoy again.
Kindle, best case scenario, you load it up full. You read all 35,000 books. Then you need a new one to read. Now what? Summats got to get deleted and THAT'S IT. Blip, it's gone. Never to be read again. No resale, no storeage, nada. It's gone. Because it never existed in the first place.
No matter anyways, you can't fill a Kindle. E-Books cost, on average, $7-$8 apiece, like real books. Can't buy a used e-book, there's no such thing.
At $7 a pop, it would cost you one quarter of a MILLION dollars to fill a Kindle reader. Which is why there isn't one on the planet that is actually full. Funny how they never mention that bit.
So lets just say you actually had the money, and you actually did it. You got a Kindle, you re-bought your entire library as e-books, and got rid of your actual books...
You own nothing. Out of the thousands of actual books I own, all of which cost considerably less than a quarter of a million dollars, probably a quarter of them are over 30 years old. A full third were published on or before D-day. Half of those first saw daylight around the great depression, and at least 50 of them pre-date WW1. I'm looking at one now - it's "A Real Diary of a Real Boy" by Henry Shute. My grandfather got it as a gift in his childhood, gave it to me, I still have it. Written in the late 1800s, published in the first 10 years of the last century. Missing its dust jacket, but other than that its as immaculate and readable as it was the day it rolled off of the presses in 1910.
I could take it outside now, throw it as high into the air as I could, let it land, step on it, take it inside, then beat a spider to death on the counter with it as hard as I could... wipe off the grass stains, the spider guts, and the dirt, shelve it, ignore it, and tthen leave it to my great grandkids in 2055... and they could still READ IT. It would still effing exist. Henry Shute would still effing exist.
Do that some time to a Kindle. See how many of your quarter million dollars worth of books even survive long enough to kill a spider. For that matter, go find the e-book version of "Real Diary of a Real Boy" by Henry Shute. I could lock a Kindle in a hermetically sealed vault tomorrow, guarantee it'll be deader than a doornail in 2111. Electronics require power, which wont be around forever, durability, which is provided by whatever company in China has enough kids on staff to do it for a dollar a day and which can make it rugged enough to outlive the one year warranty, and the willingness to spend money on something that isn't actually real.
I'll buy a kindle when I can get one that's been water damaged, and can buy used books for a dime apiece. Oh yeah, and when Kindle actually has available EVERY book that's ever been written. See, they don't tell ya... Kindle only offers things that can make a profit. In one year, they have actually erased one third, if not more, of the words that have been written. They have killed the Guttenberg bible, Henry Shute, the Magna Carta, you name it. Half of the words written by humanity no longer exist because nobody will pay $6.99 for them.
Except in real books. The ones you can't kill by dropping them. The ones you can hold and read and smell and enjoy and take anywhere and sell and buy and pack up when you move and will STILL be around when my grandchildren's grandchildren pull them off of a shelf to read.
I'm sorry. Kindle is frigging evil.
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