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Failed Writer's Journey: No E-books but Class War E-books [1]

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Date: 2025-02-14

I like Bookshop.org. All the links to the books in my reviews (new one hopefully coming next week. I am reading an excellent book by Lincoln Michel, but it’s a hard read for me for reasons I will get into during the review) are to Bookshop.org and their interface powers the bookshop here in town. I should love the idea of them selling e-books. And I do, in an abstract way, but I almost certainly will not buy any from them.

There are two major benefits, to me, in e-books. The first is space. My wife and I are both avid readers and one of my sons, while turned off in early high school, is now ramping back up to some degree. I do not have enough space in my house for all the books we read. When we moved across country ten years ago, we decided to give away almost all of our books. For three days we delivered box after box of books to Goodwill until Goodwill told us not to come back again. Even the library got tired of us quickly. E-books solve that problem.

They also solve the problem of reading on an electronic device. I will only read long from material in print or on an e-ink device. Reading for a long time has always bothered my eyes and I work on a computer, like most people, all day. My eyes need a break and print or e-ink provides that break. My problem is that Bookshop’s e-books will not work with my e-reader.

Threatened by book avalanches constantly, I bought one of the first Kindles. It was wedge shaped, had a physical keyboard, physical buttons, and a little wheel to show what you wanted to highlight. I loved it. It is still the most comfortable e-reader or tablet I have ever held. (We used to have variety in devices before Jobs convinced the tech world that a slab was the only possible form factor. Now get off my lawn.) The problem is that I have been a Kindle owner for so long that changing devices is almost impossible. Since Kindles use proprietary and largely DRM’d format, changing devices is extremely difficult for the average user. And since they almost certainly won’t let Bookshop.org easily sell to Kindles, then I likely will not be buying from them.

This should not be a problem. We should be able to force Amazon to support an open document format. We should be able to force the support an open DRM format since some booksellers still insist on having digital rights management on their books. But we don’t ever challenge business in this county. Somehow, someway we have convinced ourselves that business is sacrosanct, that the rule of government is not to ensure a healthy market for society but to ensure that businesses are allowed to accumulate as much money as they can under any circumstances. Forcing e-readers to support a common format does not prevent them from innovating or supporting other formats or anything, really, except locking in customers.

But locking in customers is a large part of how Amazon makes its money, so it is inconceivable that such a plan be challenged or prevented.

No e-books but class war e-books, but Amazon won’t let you read them on their devices.

Weekly Word Count

6050, because the fifty is important for some reason.

The word count surprised be a bit. It is smaller than usually, but not by much, and I expected it to be much smaller. The writing itself is going harder than recently. It is probably the middle book blues (I am halfway through the books based on the outline), but right now, it feels as if I am producing absolute crap. Which I likely am (failed writer, after all), but there are times when it feels like the words are less crappy than normal.

This is not one of those times.

I suspect this is why it’s hard to finish a novel. You know how the story ends, so you want to get there, but you also need to make sure the middle isn’t rushed or boring or disconnected form the needs of the story’s ending. It can and does feel like a slog for a while, but if you do not do it well, the whole book falls apart.

This has been this week’s episode of First World Whines. Join us next week when I complain about hold times with the cable company.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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