The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

No More E-Books Vs. Print Books Arguments, OK?

This article comes courtesy of Jonathan Segura at NPR.

Book lovers are understandably scared. They’ve seen Borders close up shop, and they’re afraid of what’s going to happen to the bookstores with their shelves full of books. They worry that if ebooks ‘take over’ that no one will print books any longer. Their problem isn’t that other people choose to read ebooks. It’s that they worry about their own books disappearing.

Ebook fans are likewise feeling under attack from the paper crowd. At the same time (due to friendly neighborhood cognitive dissonance) they feel they need to justify their purchase and commitment to the electronic formats. There are some general technophiles in there, who have the belief that any technology must therefore be good, (and unfortunately these are the people most likely to dispense their opinions on blogs…um, yeah). But the vast majority of the people who buy ebook readers are not these folks. Ebooks have reached your mom and dad and grandparents. They’re mass market and most of the people reading on them are probably just average literature fans.

The thing is, like the Segura states in the article above, there really is room for both. There is absolutely nothing to say that you can’t enjoy a device full of ebooks, and also still love curling up at home with a favorite volume by the fire with a cup of tea or cocoa.

For my part, I’m going to try and follow Mr. Segura’s advice, and try and ignore the cacophony of voices on both sides and just enjoy my books, my way.

One of my favorite points was on the longevity of books versus disintegrating computer disks and short-lived formats of the computer age (anyone open a .wpd document lately?).  The very ephemeral nature of ebooks is a serious shortcoming.  They are virtual.  By definition, they do not really exist.  Not in and of themselves.  They depend for their very being on the computers that they’re stored on, and the formats the computers use to do so.  If something happens to those computers, the books are lost.

Paper and print books exist.  They would continue to be even if a virus wiped out the entire human race tomorrow.  People would be gone, but the words would live on.  Immortality lives in print.

One thing I thought was missed was when he spoke of searching.  Ebooks, he said, were easier to find things in, because of built-in search functions.

That’s true, perhaps, if you know some of the words you’re looking for, perhaps for citing an exact quote.  However, I find that usually when I’m looking something up in a book I’d read before, I don’t remember the exact words of what I’m looking for (or else I probably wouldn’t need to look it up).  Instead I have a vague sense of the idea that was expressed, and often I’ll know about where in the book it was and maybe even on which page.

Flipping through pages of a book is much easier and faster for me when I’m searching in this case.  I spent thirty minutes one time trying to find something using the search in an ebook one time, only to realize when I finally just ‘flipped’ through the pages and actually found it, that I had been using a very close synonym of what I was searching for.

Definitely check out the article.  Bookmark it.  Share it.

I just wish the comments posted at the end were as well thought out and intelligent as the article itself.

Books video courtesy of the Twitter.

Typewriter video is from Poets and Writers.

You didn’t have a backup.  Or your backup got destroyed also by clever hackers or Tom Cruise.  Now all your photos, documents, and–most importantly–that novel you’ve been working on for two and a half years, are all…gone.  Leaving you pounding the ground and cursing the heavens while the skeletal remains of the Statue of Liberty stare down at you from above.

But sometimes gone isn’t really gone.

You see, computers are lazy.  When you say to delete something from the drive, instead of actually getting down on its hands and knees and scrubbing out the files, your computer just deletes the map entry that tells it where the file is.  It’s sort of like removing the book from the card catalog but leaving the actual book on the shelf.  (or, for you interwebz kidz out there, like removing the entry from Google Maps but forgetting to knock the building down.  Or something.)  The computer doesn’t actually overwrite the original file until it needs the space to write a new one.

So, when you delete something from a hard drive, even if you wipe the whole hard drive and re-install your system, the original files may still be there.

How do you get it back?  There are some handy dandy little programs that can help you with that.  They basically look behind the file map that the system keeps and examine the data that’s still left there on the drive.

I’ve personally used Data Rescue on my own hard drives before to recover my documents from a crashed computer, as well as grab photos from a memory card that I had stupidly formatted before backing up (more than once), and every time I’ve managed to get back what I thought I’d really truly lost this time.

If you don’t want to spend any money (but if anything’s worth shelling out for, I’d think this is), Lifehacker has also posted a list of free data recovery programs.  Note that I haven’t tried any of those programs so I can’t vouch for them.

Remember, it’s not over until your hard drive is reduced to a burnt cinder.

So next time you nuke your novel, or deep-six the photos from your once-in-a-lifetime trip to paradise, don’t despair, and don’t give up.  Try out some of these data recovery programs.  Chances are pretty good that you’ll be able to get at least some of your data back.

PS: Teachers, please ignore this post.  Nothing in here is actually true.  Yes, the computer really did eat your student’s homework.  Trust me.

Last time I mentioned there was another reason why I’ve been letting the blog slip.  A few days later my wife went into labor.

Yep, in addition to moving to Colorado we’ve also been getting ready for the arrival of our baby boy.  And by December 7, our new little boy decided that he had waited long enough to greet the World.

So we got our Christmas present early this year, and the past couple weeks have been spent in a time-deprivation haze–like something from an episode of Star Trek–as we’ve been in a continuous cycle of napping and feeding. Everything sort of blends together after a while.

I get parental leave at my company for about a week, and I’ve stacked some vacation behind that so that I’m able to stay home and enjoy this fresh time with the family.

I’ve even managed to get a little bit of writing done at night during the baby’s feeding times.

I’ll try and keep the blog a little more updated from now on.  Although as I say that we’ve got family coming over the next few weeks to visit with the new addition.

We had been living in Phoenix for the last couple of years, having moved down there for my job.  The biggest problem I have with Phoenix is the weather.  There is none.

For those who haven’t been there, I should say that it’s not 100+ degrees all year round.  There is only about two months or so in the middle of Summer when it’s that hot.  The rest of the year, the temperature is basically hovering in the middle of nowhere.  It’s not hot.  It’s not cold.  And the air doesn’t move.  No wind, no breeze.  So it just ends up feeling…meh.

For people who can’t stand cold, this is great.  I grew up with weather though, and I like to have some rainy days and snowy days and sunny days and overcast ones.  When you enter Phoenix, it’s like time stands still, not moving forward, the seasons not really changing, until you finally leave.

The other reason we were eager to leave Phoenix was all of our family is in the Saint Louis area, so it’s a two and a half days drive away to visit family.  With our family expanding (next post), we didn’t like being so far away, or getting to visit so seldom.

That’s why, when given the chance to move to Colorado, to the Denver office, I jumped on it.  Piled everything in the back of a truck, Beverly Hillbillies style, and moved up the mountain.

We’ve been here about a month, and I have to say, I love it here.  We’ve had three snowfalls already, and in-betweentimes it’s been sunny nice spring/fall weather.  So we’re definitely seeing the variety.  We’ve already made friends with the neighbors (never really talked to our neighbors in AZ) and have already made one trip back to St. Louis to visit family.

Not to mention it’s really nice to have Bob Ross scenery decorating the background everyday.

So this has definitely been a move that’s worthwhile.  It’s been a busy time (more in the next post) but now it’s settled down and we can ‘relax’ a little…for the next couple weeks.

A few years ago my Mother-in-law gave me a typewriter for Christmas.  She knew I had studied scriptwriting in college and had wanted to be a writer years ago.  And a few months before I had made some admiring remarks upon finding an typewriter stashed away somewhere, although it was electric.

She did her research.  She Googled and Yahoo’d typewriters and found the ones that were known for being good writing machines.  She wanted to find one that was not only a good ‘writer’s machine’, but looked classy.

She settled on the Royal Quiet Deluxe because not only was it a good looking machine, but Hemmingway famously  swore by Royal portables.  She found a beautiful black and chrome Royal Quiet Deluxe from 1947 in an antique store.

When I opened my present on Christmas day, I was floored.  It was beautiful and chrome-plated.  More importantly, it worked perfectly.

I kept the machine on the dining room table, except for putting it away when it was time to eat.  I kept running pages through it and writing out short scenes and pieces of stories.

Eventually, I took to the internet, checking some of the same sites she had given me from her research, to see about a user manual and ribbons.

I was surprised to find web sites and even a whole Yahoo! groups forum dedicated to the collection of typewriters.  I started reading about the machines, fascinated by their brilliant mechanical intracacy.

More importantly, I started using the machine to write.

Eventually I started looking up machines on ebay and craigslist, picking up a few other neglected old machines.  Now I collect typewriters.  It’s not too weird.  A friend collects ink pens (and there are plenty of typewriter collectors who also collect fountain pens and other writing paraphanalia).  Also, Tom Hanks is a prolific typewriter collector.  He has over 200 stashed away at home.  So my dozen or so machines is surely no big deal.

It’s been a long time coming, and J. K. Rowling has certainly built up a lot of suspense from some people wondering when she would ever publish her wildly successful Harry Potter novels.  Well, the answer is now.  Or rather, soon.

The bigger news though among the people concerned with the publishing industry though, causing wailing and gnashing of teeth in some cases, is that she is releasing the e-books on her own, without a publisher.  It’s all being integrated into an interactive web experience that’ll be released upon the masses this fall.

This announcement is certain to lead to a lot of questions amongst the publishing thinkers.  Some are asking if this is the final sign that e-publishing is truly here.  Or the last nail in the coffin of ‘traditional’ publishing.  Others are asking just what took so long for Harry Potter to join the e-party.

As someone who is working on getting into the publishing world, well, it proves more than ever that things are changing in ways that really can’t be predicted right now.  The literary windmills I’m chasing today are on a shifting landscape, and when I finally reach my destination, it’ll probably be completely unrecognizable from the vision I’ve seen from the distance.

We all need to just hold onto what we know for certain about the new publishing world that’s coming around the corner.  There will still be stories, and there will still be readers, and there will still be writers.  One way or another.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of various things: photography, driving a truck, marketing, eventually my current job as a computer programmer.  The one thing I have not managed to do in all these careers is write.

In the last year, though, I have started picking up the pencil again, and getting the kinks out of the literary muscles.  I have come to find again how much I love to write, and have decided that I need to just go for it, and finally dedicate myself to the career I want to have.

Having done my warm-up laps, I took a look around at the writing world today, and I realized that I probably couldn’t have picked a more confusing time to try and jump in.

There are Kindles and iPads, e-books and print-on-demand.  J. A. Konrath is preaching the new religion on the corner and the publishers are on the 27th floor trying to keep the building from coming down.

Clearly this is an industry in turmoil.

As a new writer stepping into this chaos, it is more than a little daunting.  Should I even try and get ‘traditionally’ published any more?  Or should I try and self-publish.  Do I still need an agent?  Should I focus on getting on bookshelves or just ride the e-book wave?  Where is the middle ground?

Maybe this blog will server as a question as well as an answer, for someone who asks, “I want to write…so now what?”