Sunday, September 13, 2009

The Kindle part 4 - A Plea to Authors

The Kindle is an electronic book reader produced by Amazon.

There is a small fear within me that my premise is too on target; too case-in-point.  This entry in my Kindle series is not on schedule and my desired end of month down time has been attacked.

I forgot about Labor day.

Well...I also went out of town.  Then procrastinated.  Then forgot about Labor day.  Then it was Tuesday (primary raid night) and now it is Wednesday...night (although it is actually Sunday, hooray work!).  In my defense for this last excuse surrounding my ever fading interest in holding on to one subject, I was suddenly asked to hop a plane and fly to New York and then Boston.  In fact, I am writing this on a piece of paper stuck between the sandwich bread that is the direct warning to power off all electronics and the startling airborne ding ... oh awesome ... we have just been delayed for forty minutes.  The saving grace is that we are not being held inside the sandwich.

My Kindle is turned off at the moment, primarily because I have finally caught a few moments to write and secondarily because of Wil Wheaton.

It turns out I love Wil Wheaton.  In 2007 and 2008 he saved me from the depths of dark depression with ad infinitum relistens of his PAX 2007 keynote address.  He continually inspires me with his ability to revel in his geekdom and in his ability to turn out pages and pages of delightful material.  I read his site.  I follow his tweets.  I am chronically too shy to approach him in any digital manner to express my gratitude and warm feelings for his work.  Wil Wheaton is a great writer and I want to be one, too.  Not just that, I want to be as good as Wil.  The polished style, the voice...he pushes me to better at this.

The other day, while perusing WWdN in Exile, I decided, if I had any chance at gaining the skill Wil demonstrates, I should probably get around to reading his print works.  Clicking...clicking...clicking...ah ha!  Just a Geek ... I can get that on my Kindle!  Done.

I did not dig in to it directly.  That turned out to be a good thing.  Instead, David Weber finally released By Heresies Distressed and I lost hours and hours of my free time catching up with him.

Yesterday I was tricked by Weber.  Tricked in that the final thirty or forty page turns were a dramatis personae and a brief glossary.  It was the same as book 1 (Off Armageddon's Reef - my first read on my Kindle) and book 2 (By Schism Rent Asunder).  I forgot.  The same thing has happened three times in a row and I forgot.

Anyway...tricked by the promise of more to read and suddenly denied the pleasure, I skimmed through my collection and noticed Wil's book: Just a Geek.  What the hell...click.

I went to bed late.  I arrived at work late.  I was simultaneously reading while working...while driving...right up to now where I find myself suddenly full of words for my next piece.

The writing in Just a Geek is exactly what I needed to see in print.  But the message...the message is what I needed to hear.  Thank you, Wil Wheaton.

This part was intended to be a plea to authors.  My intent was to point out that I own all the Miles Vorkosigan books, but, during the first few lonely nights in the tiny box that was my last apartment, while all my books were locked within cardboard cubes, I purchased and read a pile of them on my Kindle.  I was going to mention that while I love the three Weber books currently available, I would be more thrilled to see all of the rest including the Harringtons and the sequel to Shadows Over Saganami.  And I was definitely going to point out that having Steven Erikson's amazing Malazan books on the Kindle store is wonderful, it is criminal that the the only three available are books one, six, and seven.

I was going to wrap all of that into a plea to authors to put more content into the Amazon Kindle Storefront.  But I think the reason I delayed is because I had yet to experience Just a Geek, and by extension, I had yet to be led to the following realization:

     Everyone needs to be more like Wil Wheaton.

Also:  Wil needs to put more of his works on the Kindle.

And behold!  We are once more held in the sandwich of the Luddites.  The tower has cleared our path and my tray is once more locked in its upright position.

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About Me

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Geek - Gamer - Librarian - Writer. Only awesome at one of those things at a time, unfortunately.

About Fading Interest

After writing op-eds and travelogues for several years, after finishing a few books, and after failing to get the ball rolling with project after project I stumbled into an idea that might just hold my interest long enough to enjoy some level of satisfaction with my writing.