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Can we self publish on Kindle for free? (Read 6142 times)
Jeangoldstrom
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Re: Can we self publish on Kindle for free?
Reply #20 - Apr 11th, 2011, 6:42pm
 
As to the "gamer spam" remark, that is something Webbie has whipped up to appear whenever someone writes "w-o-w." Apparently that abbreviation is used for World of Warcraft which is some hugely popular game. I know this only because I, too, have written "that word which we must not say here" from time to time, and am faced with the "gamer spam."

Meantime, continued good luck with the blog!

-- Jean
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C.N.Pitts
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Re: Can we self publish on Kindle for free?
Reply #21 - Jul 1st, 2011, 7:01pm
 
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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J. Davidson Hero
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Re: Can we self publish on Kindle for free?
Reply #22 - Jul 2nd, 2011, 11:59am
 
C.N.

I won't disagree with your rant.  In fact, I liked it.  As a bibliophile, I have some valuable books in my collection too.  For a while now I've collected early English editions of Jules Verne's books.  Some of my books have been restored/rebound in leather with gold stamping by my very talented brother who is a book binder.  These books should last a very long time.

However, the pulp magazines of the early 20th century, even paperbacks, were printed on cheap paper that will not last, it all turns brown and crumbles.  I watched a documentary about the pulps and they talked about how a lot of the original cover art was just thrown away.  The paintings as well as the stories in the pulps were considered disposable by the publishers.  To me there seems to be some small similarity between this and the way you describe ebooks.  The thing is, a lot of the writing still survived the pulp era.  Hopefully it was the best stuff that is worth rereading.

I have yet to purchase any type of ebook reader.  However, I also don't want to be left behind as a wave of new technology picks everyone else up and carries them forward.  

J. Davidson Hero
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C.N.Pitts
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Re: Can we self publish on Kindle for free?
Reply #23 - Jul 2nd, 2011, 9:04pm
 
Ta for the sympathy, but to make a point...

I, too, am a massive bibliophile, prolly the worst one in history. Gotta say, among the many gifts my grandfather gave me, not just a love of the pulp era (which he grew up in) but a huge selection of his books and magazines from the period.

We'll call it 1931, just to keep it neat. 80 years ago.

80 years ago, one of our ancestors was charged with setting type for every single word. I've worked in a print shop setting type, and I can tell you it flat out sucks. You work in a crowded sauna, picking small wooden blocks out of a box and screwing them into a small wooden frame, upside down and backwards, to get it just right. Then you crank the handle, over and over and over and over... all the while waiting for someone like Virgil Finlay, the greatest artist who ever lived, to go six months over deadline because he was trying to find perfection doing an illustration for the story using nothing but ink and a paintbrush made from a single human hair.

(Not joking, Finlay is the most brilliant artist the world has ever seen)

Now you just click, drag, cut and paste, then press a button.

Cheap as it was, that pulp paper is still holding up. I have a stack of Wierd Tales and a hundred books that can attest to that.  Paper, eventually, will rot. But that takes outside factors, like heat, humidity, age... hell, the dead sea scrolls made it 2000 years and they are still going. Electronics just effing die. I'll take my chances on old paper. It will always outlive something written on the gap between two electrons.

Stuff done with love will always outlive stuff done for money. See, it's like music... records first, then along comes 8 tracks. Half the nuts we've been listening too isn't profitable, so we arenn't gonna bother to convert it. Then comes along cassettes... Half the nuts we've been listening too isn't profitable, so we arenn't gonna bother to convert it. Oh look, here comes CDs... Half the nuts we've been listening too isn't profitable, so we arenn't gonna bother to convert it. Hello digital downloads! Half the nuts we've been listening too isn't profitable, so we arenn't gonna bother to convert it.

Half of all the music ever written is lost forever... because it isn't profitable. Books are the same. Fully half of the words that have ever been written are dead, gone, and lost forever. Hell, almost everything I've ever managed to get published on actual paper has been farted into nonexistence by the march of technology. I've got nought but a handful of nuts mags crammed together on my bookcase...

But what the hell, they actually exist.

Don't buy into it. Every advancement actually halves the existance of real work, done by real people, in nuts conditions for the sake of love of the art.

- note: In the above rant, Webbie's filters turn the word "s*h*i*t into the word "nuts." substitute at your leisure. ROTFLMAO  ;D
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Adrienne_Ray
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Re: Can we self publish on Kindle for free?
Reply #24 - Jul 4th, 2011, 3:58pm
 
I too love books. Some of my books are over  100 years old. My mother used to boast of a library that included every topic she knew about. When she died I got about half her books and that is enough for me to have my own library at home.
I very seldom get rid of a book. I mostly read non fiction and I keep everything I buy because I will be referring back to that book again. I have no real need to own a kindle.
My husband's cousin reads mysteries. She doesn't want to reread a book, once she knows who the murderer is, what's the point? My friends who read a novel a day disgard bags of books at a time. Sometimes they just throw them away.These are the people for whom Kindle was made.
I would really hate to see Kindle replace real books but I think there is a place for them in this electronic society.
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C.N.Pitts
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Re: Can we self publish on Kindle for free?
Reply #25 - Jul 4th, 2011, 7:45pm
 
Okay, that one I will happily agree with. The Kindle is a godsend for the people who read something and that's it, done, don't care. They can have it, and thinking about it the stupid thing is actually a blessing, because it keeps real books away from the people who don't have the love.

Here's how bad I am - we have a cut-out bin, donation box book thingy in the grocery store down the street. People who have books to get rid of chuck them in the box, people who have money chuck it in the till and take them.

One day I'm down there, and someone has thrown in a beat-to-hell hardcover copy of 'Peril at end house' by Agatha Christie. This is a book I already have THREE copies of, two paperback editions and one hardcover, what with agatha being one of my favorite authors (one of the best the world has ever seen), even more if you count the Suchet audiobook, the BBC radio dramitization, and the two video game adaptations, all of which I also have. This is a library discard that has had an even harder life after. The spine looks like a brillo pad, the pages are only held in by the cobwebs, it's full of silverfish tunnels, and the entire book is awash in yellowed scotch tape.

And I threw a buck into the bucket and took it home to save it.

I'm looking at it now, it's on the bookshelf in the corner. And the darned thing is glowing. It's tickled to death that I rescued it. It knows, even though I will prolly never read it rather than it's twins, that it has come to somewhere where it is appreciated for what it is. A book, by a brilliant author, printed on real paper.

It's effing pathetic, the way I feel this need to save underappreciated books. But I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Adrienne, thank you. You put Kindle into perspective for me. Kindle is for people who DON'T see a beat up work of genius book in a bad situation and feel the need to save it just so it can be loved and appreciated for what it is.

Still wanna cry though. Because Kindle is outselling actual books. And nobody with a Kindle will ever know what it feels like to have a genuine, real book.... a work of love... that little smile that  says "thanks for caring." The joy of old paper, the... eff it, quit there.
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monsoonster
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Re: Can we self publish on Kindle for free?
Reply #26 - Oct 13th, 2011, 1:23am
 
I don't like kindle or the idea of kindle, either. I dislike reading stuff on the computer, for the most part, as a rule. However... if people are reading at all, no matter what medium is employed, it's a good thing.

Unless it becomes a thing that anyone can publish upon. Without editorial oversight; like the writing on comments and blogs.
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