Good soggy morning to you all. It's raining like someone left the celestial spigot on again so I decided it might just be time for a little 'hey-y'all-watch-this" moment for your entertainment from your thirty-fifth favorite writer. No, seriously. I actually had someone refer to me as their thirty-fifth favorite writer the other day and yours truly took it as a compliment.
Talk about desperate for validation, right?
Moving right along ...
For my little parlor trick today I'm going to take issue with my own industry, as it were, and pray quietly that in doing so I don't come off as more of a raving jackass than I usually do. Again with the validation thing but hey, it is MY sandbox after all.
At the risk of sounding like this line should be read by Bob Saget: "Kids, we really need to talk about these e-books."
Before I begin to spiral off into the land of high pretention, or even give the illusion that I might, let me be clear about something. I KNOW we live in the digital age. I KNOW that mass marketability and consumption demand a digital presence. I KNOW that just as soon as I finish this damn book and submit it for publication it will end up as an e-book and that of the ten copies I will probably sell seven will be digital. I KNOW and I ACCEPT that I actually have a problem with something that I not only own but buy regularly and will probably be a part of the measure of whatever microtome thin measure of success I achieve as an author. YES I KNOW I'M A RAVING HYPOCRITE ABOUT THE ENTIRE ISSUE.
The fact of it all is that no matter how many of the damn things I have on my phone or laptop and no matter how many of them I want to potentially sell over my career as a wordsmith, I KINDA HATE E-BOOKS.
Maybe my hatred is just symptomatic of getting old or just old fashioned. Simply put, I've wanted to be a writer for most of my life. I have this picture in my head of a bookshelf or two filled with my own work. Not a bookcase full, mind you I'm nowhere near that grandiose, but just a shelf or two filled the tangible creations of my warped little mind that one day a grandchild of mine might bump into in the family library. I have this goofy idea of a member of my future family reading one of my books and shaking their and laughing at what a crazy shit their grandfather was back in the day. Come to think of it, that's actually the image I have of my mother's dad now. Huh, go figure...
Now take just a second and peel the patina of sentimentality off that cute little image. Nowhere in that little picture did I mention little Johnny pulling out his Kindle Fire 32 while waiting at the doctor’s office and finding one of his grandfather's books in the "Don't Even Bother Except for the Fact that it's Free" section, right next to Bubba and the Dead Girl 27. Kind of a different notion now ain't it? (No true disrespect to the author of Bubba and the Dead Girl. I tend to use that book, like Amber Benson's blog, as proof that no matter how badly I may think I suck I know in my heart that at least I'm not that bad.)
I like to think of myself as at least a somewhat creative person. Delusional, possibly, but at least somewhat creative. I tend to believe that being creative requires the creation of something tangible. Something material that you can put your hot little hands on, pick up, carry around and/or potentially throw at someone. You just can't do that with an e-book. Yes I understand the convenience of the damn things. As I said before I have many of them and use them several times a week. But there is something to be said about a book, a real, actual book. I volunteer currently at a struggling library. The whole place has that book smell to it. It occurs to me as I walk through the fiction section that there are all these authors around me that I'm fighting to become a contemporary of and with. I actually get a sense that, for better or worse, my work in whatever small way will actually be part of history and could very well end up in a library just like this one day. (Where do you think I'm planning to plant a good chunk of my review copies?) I just don't get that feeling browsing the B&N catalog online. In fact, the only real feeling I get when I do that is a slight discomfort in my lower back from my slowly giving up the fight recliner and a moderate feeling of anxiety over where that last cheese curl I dropped might have gotten off to. I guess that's what I get for watching late night TV, naked, while eating cheese curls and browsing for e-books. Well, actually scratch that. I don't think I was naked. In reality I think I was still wearing socks.
E-Books. Are they convenient? Yes. Do they really diminish from the experience of reading? With AMOLED screens and the like on e-readers, they probably make it better. Do they do a lot for ease and accessibility for readers, particularly when it comes to having a book nearby at all times and discovering new authors easily? Definitely.
Why do I hate them?
Really, I have no clue. Maybe I'm just a burgeoning Luddite. Maybe I need to yell at the neighbor kid to get off my lawn again. Or maybe it's just that I'm confronted on a daily basis with the realization that technology is changing our world rapidly and that some things, like actual books and not their digital counterparts, may actually be heading the way of the dinosaurs. That's an extinction event I just don't believe I'm up for this week.
To close this out, let me go ahead and answer the one glaringly obvious comment right now.
"But Brian, you write a BLOG for chrissakes. How can you have the balls to bitch about e-books?" My response... nothing. Just do me a favor and buy the paperback when I publish the blog as a book, okay?
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