Goodreads Bookshelf
E-Books
Over the weekend, I found myself reading two different E-Books. Now, overall, I'm not a big fan of E-Books as a medium. I'm not one who's trumpeting them to be the death of paper and ink. I love "real" books and don't see myself "switching" over. There's just a lot to be said for the feel of a book. Still, I found myself reading two of them over the weekend.
I read both of them on my computer screen, rather than a special reader, and obviously that has less of a portable feel. My laptop is a tablet PC, which means that it has a stylus pen that allows me to write directly on the screen. Along with that, the screen can be flipped around and laid flat, and when that's done the orientation of the screen flips from horizontal to vertical. For most things, this looks strange, but for E Books that have one page page1, it's an ideal orientation. When one zooms to a full-screen view, one can easily read the text on each page.
I found it hard to read for long periods of time. There's just something about a computer screen that makes it hard to read it for long periods of time. This felt particularly true of the first book I read, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin. I was reading this to participate in a fantasy and sci-fi book club discussion on GoodReads. The book was all right, but it didn't really grab me. The style, I thought, owed a lot to the fairy tale tradition. I often felt, as a consequence, that we were just skimming over the main character Ged's life, dipping down for a scene here or there to catch the important plot points. As a consequence of this, I found it hard to really care about Ged. That said, the style seemed in some ways to fit the character, who seemed so focused first on his own development and later on his quest to defeat his shadow, that he didn't seem particularly engaged in the world or the people around him, except by fits and spells. The other side of this style is that it gives the whole story a certain archetypal quality. It also has the feel of a storyteller telling a story rather than a novelist writing one, if you see the distinction I'm trying to get at.
The other book I was reading was Steven Brust's My Own Kind of Freedom. Apparently, Brust pitched this to the appropriate people as an officially-licensed tie-in to Joss Whedon's Firefly/Serenity universe. Whedon said no, but apparently Brust really wanted to write this novel, so he did. He's "published" it on-line as a free E-Book. It's essentially "fan fiction," but when a great professional fantasy writer takes a crack at fan fiction--at least in this case--the result is excellent. The novel is set between the last episode of the television series and the movie Serenity. Inara and Book have left the ship; otherwise, everyone is here. Every character, at one point or another, is a point-of-view character, and Brust does an excellent job getting into each character's head. The most remarkable accomplishment is River. As a character who, by her very nature, cannot adequately express herself verbally, having a few scenes from her point of view really offered a lot of insight. Of course, Joss Whedon might tell us Brust got it wrong, but he sure makes it feel right. At times, she almost seems too coherent, but I think it works. If you're a fan of Firefly and Serenity or of Steven Brust, you should definitely check this out. It's a good match for each of them. If you're a fan of both, I trust you started downloading the book just as soon as you saw that it existed.
The cool thing about E-Books is that they allow projects like this to happen. There's virtually no overhead, so it's easy for someone like Brust to "publish" a novel for free, donating his time and talent. Likewise, other people can publish their own books and sell them relatively inexpensively because they don't have to pay expenses for printing or marketing the book. Of course, the profusion of books that this allows--and will allow in the future--has the downside that it's hard to sort through and find the good from the bad.
Also, it can be hard for authors to profit from their works--for instance, I have no idea whether the distribution of A Wizard of Earthsea was legal or not. I know that some authors have allowed some of their works to be distributed for free, but I didn't look very closely into it when someone offered a free on-line edition to read so that I could read it and discuss it.
At any rate, it will be interesting to see how the publishing world develops. For the right people, it could be an exciting time--the same way that William Blake had complete control over his publishing and did some amazingly original things, writers now have the same kinds of opportunities if they seiz them.
Your thoughts are, as always, welcome.
1. I know that sounds strange, but some are set up to look like a book has been laid flat and scanned in, so it has two pages showing. Another E Book I'm reading right now is set up that way.