A Tale of Two Formats

To kick the new year off I decided to read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.  Now I know I have 2-3 copies of this book floating around on my bookshelves and in the boxes of books scattered throughout my house. After half-heartedly scanning a bookshelf I decided to search for it online and I was thrilled to discover it was free. I knew some of the classics were free, but until I searched for this book I had no idea that so many of them were available. It truly blows my mind that the greatest books ever written are available at our fingertips for absolutely nothing. Have a look here for yourself if you don't believe me. It was like Christmas all over again and I spent a couple of hours merrily downloading everything I hadn't read (the only downside is that my TBR list has now grown dramatically when I was supposed to be reducing it this year!).

After I'd finished my downloading spree I was suddenly hit with a wave of nostalgia for all of my books mouldering away on shelves and in boxes. I'd always assumed that one day I'd resurrect these faithful friends and read them all over again. Most of them already came from second hand bookshops and their yellowing pages and musty smell only enhanced the reading experience in my opinon, but after I'd seen them online these most treasured of possessions began to look more like relics from a bygone era. In the past when people argued about ebooks vs hard copies I always claimed there was room for both, but after this experience I began to wonder if hard copies really are on their way out. I felt saddened by the thought of homes of the future with no bookcases or dog-eared novels lying around on the coffee table to be picked up and browsed through at leisure.

Fast forward a couple of days and I was reading my Kindle in 40 degree heat when it suddenly just gave up and conked out. I had to put it down to rest in a dark, cool room and even then it took a couple of hours to revive.  Nothing like this would ever happen to a 'real' book, which is made of much sterner stuff. Hard copy books laugh in the face of extreme temperatures and electricity black outs. They can be read by candlelight, dropped, thrown around the room and jammed into boxes without even leaving a mark. Kindles on the other hand can't even handle something as simple  as being accidentally sat on (as I can attest to after losing my first Kindle in a tragic accident which still brings tears to my eyes).

The moral of the story is don't throw away your old books just yet. Ebooks are convenient and great in their way, but technology is fallible, and it always pays to have a back up plan. I look at my bookshelves with renewed respect and I'm going to make an effort to pick up a 'real' book every now and then just to remind myself of how good it feels to hold something solid and tangible that has proven it can stand the test of time.

A Short-Attention-Span Culture

The question of whether computers are contributing to a decrease in peoples attention spans has plagued me a lot over the last few years. I know for a fact that I don't have the patience to sit down and read a book for hours like I once did. Recently I decided to read a few more of the classics and I found it very hard to maintain my attention at first. I'm so used to reading books that are easy to read that the more difficult language was hard to adapt to, but having read many of these books in the past, I persevered because I knew it was worth it. But what about young people who have never known the joys of Charles Dickens or Jane Austen? I fear they will just give up and move onto something else because it's too much of an effort.

E-readers have contributed to this problem in my experience because they make it so easy to flick between books. Even when I'm reading something on my Kindle I'm thinking about all the other books on my Kindle that I could be reading, and instead of focusing on one I read a bit, then move to something else for a few pages. The result is I have a lot of half-read books on my Kindle. Does anyone else have this problem, or is it just me?

Although the internet has been a godsend for writers in terms of research and connecting with readers, one of the major drawbacks is that there is so much to distract you from actually writing, especially if you are a procrastinator. Instead of focusing on my manuscript I find myself writing a few lines and then checking sales figures on Amazon (which does nothing to encourage me!), then looking at my emails, finding books to download, reading reviews, checking social networking sites, skimming newspapers, and basically doing everything except writing. It definitely comes down to a question of willpower and mine is so lacking that I've seriously considered disconnecting my broadband so I can get some work done! My sadly dimishing attention span reached alarming levels last week when I found I'd been listening to the radio in my car in scan mode (ie. when you hear a few seconds of a station before it moves to the next one), for twenty minutes without even realizing it. Flicking from one thing to the next has come to seem so normal to me that it felt perfectly alright to hear just a few seconds of a song before moving on.

This article from The New York Times confirmed my fears. According to the article:

Recently, Internet mavens got some bad news. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina. They found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores. (this study was conducted before Twitter and Facebook became popular).

The opinion piece also discusses a book by Nicholas Carr called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, in which the author argues that "the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation."

Having felt real despair when reading some of the books that have made it onto the bestseller's lists lately, I have to agree with the view that readers are much less willing today to study the works of great writers and scholars, and  "immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom".
 
A citizen of the Internet has a very differet experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference.....The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

While there are definite advantages to this breaking down of hierarchies, the real degeneration in literary standards is of great concern to me. I can't help feeling that in this fast-paced, superficial, short-attention-span culture, something invaluable is being lost.

Kindle Direct, You're Killing Me

Yesterday I took my first tentative step into the world of self-publishing through Kindle Direct with my short story Written In the Stars. It was an experience that probably would have been a lot easier if I hadn't tried to research it first.

Being the girly swot that I am I took it upon myself to find out as much as I could before I got started. What I read really scared the bejesus out of me. There was all this information about converting word documents into html code that had me diving for the drinks cabinet and warning my other half that I would probably be needing his help very soon. When I actually got around to checking out Kindle Direct itself,  it was extemely easy and simple to use. It's actually easier than creating a blog...except for one minor thing - indentation.

OMG. The Kindle Direct instructions state that every first line in a paragraph is automatically indented, and if you want to indent other lines, you must do it manually and not through the tab key. I tried it their way, but when I previewed my book some lines were indented and other were not, meaning I had to go back and fix all the errors...Only problem was after I fixed them, when I previewed the new version other lines were not indented. The most bizarre thing of all was that when I scrolled back up a page I'd already checked, different lines were now indented and other weren't. After a couple of hours of this I was at my wits end!

Thank god you can preview and edit books as many times as you need to before publishing, and even after publishing it's extremely easy to take books down and re-edit them. I think I must have hit a record for the number of times I previewed my book.

To cut a long story short, I simply took out all idents, justified the text to the left and added double spacing between paragraphs. It worked and Kindle Direct DID NOT indent every first line in a paragraph. I actually think it looks quite good.  If you'd like to shell out a whopping 99 cents you can take a look for yourself, and possibly read my short story while you're at it!

http://www.amazon.com/Written-in-the-Stars-ebook/dp/B007IHRA9C/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1331361810&sr=1-4

In future I'm probably going to stick to this format because it will save me a lot of headaches, unless someone has got some advice about how to overcome this glitch in Kindle Direct. I notice many other ebooks have no problem with indentation, so there's a (remote) possibility the problem is with the user!