What Happened to the Kindle?

You remember that funny thing that lit up and then went dead really fast. Or how about that thing you tried to read in the sun and it was like a black piece of slate. Or that thing where you never knew what page you were on and couldn't tell when you would finish the book or if the pages were marked and you couldn't spill jelly or coffee on it or throw it in your backpack or get it wet or find that one book you know you downloaded but now it is just gone. You know the thing that was supposed to be the IPOD of books. What happened to it?

I know I know. There are a lot of people out there who are happy kindle users but it is weird when the hardcover of my book  outpaces the kindle by four to one. People seem willing to plunk down 29.00 for a hardcover instead of getting an electronic version of less than half the price. The bigger question is why didn't it blow away all those pulpy books especially hardcovers.
Could it be readers are different than people who listen to music and while spotify tore the music biz to pieces the kindle fizzled like a bottle rocket.

The rub on this is the kindle flat lined somewhere and the novelty wore off and people went back to buying books. I am a perfect example. My kindle is jammed with books. And for a while that was my thing. No more books. Just electronic. But I missed marking up my books, I missed bending the pages, knowing how far i had to go...I missed READING a book. It is different. When I asked my comp class  in college who had a kindle? Not one hand went up.

So maybe it will come back. But until then bring on the coffee and jelly and bend back those pages and throw that bad boy by the tub. And the great thing is you don't have to plug it  in. My own kindle sits on my dresser...covered in dust.

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson

The Second LIfe of a Book

Thirty one thousand downloads later and Tobacco Sticks has a second life. This was not possible for a book unless another publisher bought the rights and resuscitated some out of print title. Because books don't have a long shelf life and if they don't sell then they tend to disappear. Enter the net where suddenly books that have been dead have life breathed into them by readers looking for a title they can get a deal on.

I had managed to keep the ebook rights to Tobacco Sticks and had not done much with them until I saw other authors putting out their backlist at a discount. A highly reviewed book may or may not reach it's market. And when that window of opportunity closes down then the book disappears. A lot of time it is market forces and  a book doesn't have a chance. Who knows what really sells a book.

But now an author can take a second shot and readers can have a second glance. It beats the alternative. A book damned to the darkness after a very short life.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher
 

Reading Huckleberry Finn on a Kindle

It doesn't work. Sorry. I tried. But there are some books that have to be read in paper. I read to half and put it down. Of course I have read the book many times but I wanted to dip back in and I had it on the Kindle and nah. Didn't work. And why didn't it work. It is lighter. It is more convenient. Hell I can even read it in the bathtub with the cat swimming around. Of course one false move and so much for the kindle and the cat. But the biggest reason I could not read Twain's classic in a mini computer format was because the story did not fit the form.

And here is where Jeff Bezos meets the road. Literature is an art all rankings aside. There are other considerations than how many units can be moved and all the digital BS in the world will not change the fact that the immutability of art trumps commerce. It always has. Why do billionaires buy paintings and pay millions for them. Not because of the investment...it is because they want to own art. Something that can not be bought. It is the eternal that makes money seem small and art if it is any good is all about the eternal.

And so it is with Huckleberry Finn. You cannot read about Huck and Jim floating down the river on a flickering screen. Twain did not intend it that way nor did history. Those old crackly pulped pages must turn again for you to hear the splash of that raft and Jim musings on the cosmos and Hucks hard headed deliverance. So I turn back against form and go for content.

Style over substance loses out and the pulp litters the water while the cat swims.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher




 

The King of Crap

There is a new paradigm in publishing now. Who will be the King of Crap.  Crap being what games the algorithms on Amazon. The publishing world is changing so fast it takes your breath away and then makes you want to hold it for the stench it is producing. I am talking about the crap that is moving into the cyber vacuum and it is crap. It is whatever is put behind an ecover and flung into the blogosphere. The King of Crap doesn't care. Because the computers kick up the title for a  nice bump and a list appears.

#45 on Ants/literature/walnuts/books about toilet paper. And this then is taken as gospel. Bestsellerdom. Throw some free giveaways into the mix and you have The King of Crap crowing from the rooftops #1 on Toilet paper books about wiping! This then is the new modality. The new fame of the self published author who is not about literary quality. In fact the KOC makes no bones. "Whats the point of being good at something if you cant sell?" An actual quote. Commodification at it's lowest point.

And so KOC publishes. And publishes mightily. One hundred titles a year is a stated goal. You heard right and take it from me producing one hundred titles of self published Crap is not hard. You just sit and write one and three days later upload with your cover. And the computer will treat you as a darling. This is what aspirants to the crown know. Algorithms dictate sales. New books get pushed up front. So you repeat and repeat and repeat until the crown is yours.

The newly crowned and admired King of Crap. Welcome to the publishing world of the early twenty first century. We can only go down from here.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The New Publishing World: Quanity over Quality

You must know that publishing has changed. Well it has. It is driven by algorithms...specifically algorithms coded by Amazon. And in this world more is better. Amazon recognizes content and it doesn't matter what kind of content. As long as it is new. Authors know this, especially kindle authors and so the new mantra is quantity over quality. Gone are the authors who spend years on books and then publish. There are now authors who publish every week. Some every few days. It is a very different world out there.

And these authors have sales to prove it. Some. Not all of course. But Amazon ranks the authors with a lot of books higher than the ones who have just a few. Now this is not official but it is known among the successful book marketers. And so people publish just about anything. A short story. A novella. A novel. A one page story. It doesn't really matter in this bits and bytes world. As long as you have the next book ready to go.

Series rule. They are the gold standard now. You must have a series. This accomplishes several things. One a book followed by another gets the same reader. Two it keeps the publishing rocking so Amazon can recognize this is an author who deserves to be pushed. So we have this quantity over quality modality that is now putting immense pressure on authors. Everyone feels it who buys into the whole "its a brave new world out there and I must adapt" mantra. Even I have stared eyeing old manuscripts...maybe...

But there is also this. One good book can outsell a hundred bad books. It is all how you want to build your spaceship. My books usually take years. But who knows. Maybe I can shorten that up. At least by a year or so.

The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have

What you can do with your Book over a Kindle

Books are dinasorial but they have a function. For one thing you can read a book in the sun. You  cannot read your kindle in the sun. Alright. Maybe the old kindles but not the kindle fire. It is is just a black piece of marble. And you can read your book in the tub. You cannot read your kindle in the tub. I did. I dropped it. No more kindle. My book just got soggy.

You cannot throw your kindle on the floor or in in your backpack or on your shelf. Not if you want to lose a couple hundred bucks. Throw that book anywhere and you can still read it. You cannot read your kindle with toast and jelly and coffee. Your fingers are sticky and gum up the screen. You cannot dribble egg yolk on your kindle. Many of my books have yellow stains. You cannot spill coffee on your kindle. You cant get too far from a plug with your kindle especially the later ones. They just turn black. You never have to plug your book in. Ever!

You cannot turn down the page of your kindle and the bookmark function doesn't work a lot of times so you have to find your page again. Your book. Turn down the page. Rip it. Piss on it. Do what you have to do but you can find your place. You cant leave your kindle out in the rain. You can leave your book in the rain. It just gets fat.

Here's a big one. You forget what you read with your kindle. Your book lays around and you say oh yeah...that was a good book. Or...I better read that book I bought. With your kindle your book is hidden and forgettable. You also cant look ahead in your kindle...im sorry it is not the same. And you can't look back to see how much you have read.

 And finally you cant turn the last page of your kindle and hold it and go wow that was a good book!
You just turn it off. Bummer.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Kamikaze writing the Big Book

My mother in law asked me what I was working on. Usually I just say something vague, but I told her I was working on a big book and that I was six hundred and sixty pages into it. She paused, then looked at me and said "who the hell wants to read a book that big?" Fair enough. It gets worse because I will probably break a thousand. But when writing the big book you are a bit like a kamikaze where you are not sure you are coming back from this one.

First of all no one wants a really big book anymore. They are expensive to publish. And there is that old thing that peoples attention span is getting shorter not longer. Look at Kindle singles. Look at what is selling. Look at twitter! And there you go, writing an opus along the lines of Gone With the Wind or War and Peace. Talk about insane. Your agent doesn't want you to do it and yet you persist. Why?

Maybe because you can. Maybe because you wont ever do it again. Maybe you just want to see if you can write the big book and take a swipe at the "whats it all about sweepstakes." Why not? You have written everything else. Why not throw in everything but the kitchen sink and go for it. You only live once right? And so you strap yourself in, start the motor, and fly toward your final destination. A human torpedo headed for total destruction or total nirvana.

That's the big book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Publishing Worm in Apple

Yeah. I get why the big publishers went to Apple and said you know what; lets fix a price we can all live with here. Amazon is a leaking ship on the good seas of Ebook commerce and the economics are devastating. Ebooks drop pricing to the floor and Amazon was intent on doing just that. I set my own prices on my ebooks (I happen to own the rights) and one thing I found out was that ebooks are priced low low low compared to regular books. You can see the IPOD nightmare of publishing over the next hill with .99 cent downloads.

But you still can't stack the deck. And whose to say what really happened at this point, but it sounds like the publishers tried to turn back the clock and stop the hemorrhage. And it is a hemorrhage. You are talking about a twenty five dollar hardcover versus a ten dollar ebook or worse. And once file sharing really kicks on ebooks that will be getting nothing for that old hardcover. So now what? Well...people still like to read books. And they like a quality ebook.

So instead of fixing the price with Apple for books on their IPADs, really the publishers should come up with their own hardware or high end ebooks. Look. There are a lot of people who do not like the Kindle but there isn't a lot of competition out there.  The Nook. The Sony Reader. They all still feel like a computer. Yeah. I have a Kindle but I still prefer a book. What I'm saying is we are not there yet and there is a lot of room for someone to get it right.

Old Steve Jobs knew that. The IPAD. The IPHONE. The IPOD. Even though he went along with the price fix, he knew it is really all in the delivery.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Even writers have to throw a punch

Ebooks are all the rage but ubiquity should not be a cover for getting free downloads. The Internet enjoys free reign because it is new and this has allowed it to keep one step ahead of the great fist of restraint. But authors and everyone else with a book knows that what happened to the music business is happening to publishing. Just because you can get a book on the Internet does not mean we should just go oh well anybody can download anything they want now. They can't.

The IPOD motif of books has not arrived. The Kindle while  very good is a poor substitute for the book. It just isnt the same. Sorry. But reading from a screen is reading from a screen. Now as an author who wants exposure I don't particularly mind the free downloads. The writers first goal after getting published is to get read and availability is a big deal. But right behind that you wouldn't mind getting paid either. This is hard stuff for writers who are used to existing on nothing. Average income for writers...nine grand. Och.

So you have these creatures who are used to getting screwed over  and making very little. Now they are going to have to stand up and say don't download my book for free! Thank God for the Authors Guild. They do most of the heavy lifting but individual writers have to decide if they want their books disseminated for free or not. Again you are torn between getting read and getting paid. The big hitters not so much.

But when you come down to it, getting paid legitimizes the work. You have to give value to your work first and hopefully the public will follow. These are changing times, but writers are used to that. The difference now is that people who are used to working alone will have to stand up for themselves and their work and get involved  or risk being pushed around yet again.

Even writers have to learn to throw a punch.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Millionaire Troll Author

By now you have heard of the girl in Minnesota who couldn't get published or considered by agents and so she shot her troll based novels out on Kindle and made a cool million dollars then got a big contract with a publisher and made even more and now her books are being made into movies and life is good for the twenty something (barely) who took a chance on herself and hit the lottery of new technology and sidestepped publishing and essentially hit the lottery of mass entertainment. So what does all that mean to authors and publishers?

Well nothing new under the sun. We have heard of these stories of the unrecognized author who is dug out of the slush pile or self publishes and the world is introduced to a book that would have suffered the fate of most rejected manuscripts: the moldy box in the basement. But what backs this story into something new is the ease in which this author broke the back of main stream publishing. She simply uploaded her books and people started to read them and  more people started to read them and then more people started to read them. The digital bestseller is a bit like an atom bomb. Fission is possible.

But of course for most of us this does not occurs. The atoms do not bang up against each other in the proper sequence and the uploaded book takes it lonely place in cyberspace, unreviewed, unread, a little catalog of bits and bytes. But here it worked fabulously. Expect troll books up the ying yang. YA will be seen as even more of a gold mine than it already is. Expect more ebook success stories. Expect publishers not to change. Expect authors to remain frustrated.

Publishers cannot recognize the gold in front of them because they don't know what it is anymore. Especially now. Large conglomerates push down hard on editors and the bottom line long ago pushed over literary merit. The divining rod has clearly bent to commerce if it ever bent away in the first place. Weird things happen. People get struck by lighting, win the lottery, publish books about trolls that make millions of dollars. Does this matter to the writer? Yeah and no. It is good to know it is possible, but you view it the same way you hear about someone who gets the catastrophic disease or writes a hit song. How does that happen? What must it be like to be that person.

Ultimately though, you pick up the pen and start again. Hmm...lets see.  Ok. I got it. A boy wizard who turns into a troll! What?  It might work....I was seriously thinking of a troll book even before Mrs. Minnesota. No, really. You don't think I would follow a trend for money. Please.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer
Rocket Man...keeping your house shouldnt be this hard

Amazon is competing now with Libraries

Just when you thought the world of publishing couldn't get any weirder, it does. Why don't we just call publishing an entity of permanent change. Amazon is getting into the world of the librarians with brown brogans and reading glasses. Except the authors have to go along. I was contacted as I am sure many of you were who have books with Amazon in their kindle collection. KDPSELECT is the name of the program and basically you let people read your books for free...well its free to them. Let me explain

So Amazon has a big fund that you as the author get a part of when people read your books. The PRIME members get access to this vast library for free. They get to read your work and you get exposure and some remuneration. It is the wild west of ebooks and everyone is trying all sorts of new marketing gimmicks. Since libraries will now be heavily into Ebooks with lending going on in cyberland like never before, Amazon is hearing some footsteps and figured they  would create their own library.

And what does the author get out of it. For the bestselling authors it is not such a great deal. They probably lose on this deal with a smaller cut, but for the mid list authors who are still developing market presence it might not be such a bad thing. You can take the Kid Rock approach and not offer your stuff on Itunes because you believe people should pay for a quality product, but writers want to be read and this might get you a few more.

The cynical view is authors are just getting ripped off again, maybe, but then again you have to take the long view. I have tried it for ninety days with my books and I am not sure if it will make a difference or not. Maybe there are some who will not take a flyer on my books for the price of an ebook but with the enticement of a free download, a Hazelgrove novel might be just the ticket. Or maybe I'm just another writer getting screwed over again. Who knows.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one mans war with suburbia

Why Are Books Sales Up?

According to the New York Times books sales are up after Black Friday and I'm not talking about Ebooks. We are talking about the old pulp and cover books. Booksellers were surprised to find people reaching for the Desotas of publishing when everyone had written off the old paper and ink behemoths as DOA. But people have a funny way of surprising you and readers surprise everybody. Like writers, readers do not follow trends.

Speaking for myself I have becomes less enchanted with the ebook. I had thought this would be my preferred way of reading with the quick download of yet another book right after finishing one. But I missed the physicality of a book. I missed looking at the cover and knowing how much more I had to read and getting jelly and coffee all over the pages. I missed turning down the pages and throwing it in my backpack to whip out at a coffee house.

Of course the thought is that the IPOD will be the format for the IBook and the kindle will spread like wildfire and of course it has. But books are not songs. There is a difference and reading Virginia Woolf will not be the same on a small lit up screen. It just isn't. But of course economics dictate the day eventually, but readers are not to be corralled so easily. They might just buck the trend of the buck. As Mr. Fezziwick said in A Christmas Carol...there are more important things than making money sir.

So there is.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Falling off the Kindle Train

Uh oh. Fell off the kindle train. Burning the eyes. Yeah I know it is supposed to be like print but I found myself squinting all the time. Maybe its just a coincidence but reading from the little screen just stopped appealing to me. I will still use it I guess, but a book sure feels better. And I know you can make the type bigger and all that. I just think I'm tired of reading from devices.

We lived in ether world now and it's getting worse. Tech is robbing us of personal moments and I don't know this just felt like more tech to me. And I'm a tech freak so I think the burning eyes and the feeling of not holding a book just bothered me. Maybe the gadget thing wore off. You know, you get a new phone and its great for a bout a week and then it just becomes your phone. No big deal.

Anyway. I'm back to buying books. Whew. Expensive man. A hardcover is like twenty one bucks. What the hell. I could download it for half the price! But I dont' know. I read The Art of Fielding and The Help on my  kindle and when I see the book in the store I still want to own those books. I just own some bytes and yeah its cool to look at the cover and read the inside info of a real pulpy book.

I know with the color Kindle Fire it will get better. But old dog new trick. Maybe. Or maybe I just want to own something again. Like a book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Kindle and our Libraries of Old

My fondest memories are rolling through the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore and finding new books to read. I always read what I wasn't supposed to be reading because I wasn't supposed to be reading it. Rosemary's Baby or a book about drugs called Tuned Out or just about any flashy cover on the paperback rack. But then I disappeared into the stacks and looked for my Henry Huggins books or Romona and Beatrice or Tom Swift or the Hardy Boys. Then I would sometimes just walk the stacks and find the big picture books from World War II and sit down and pour over the photos of battle and gore and marvel at men who actually went and fought and died.

Finally, I would check out my books and walk home in the crisp twilight with the excitement of the books under my arms. I still feel that excitement when I walk into a library today. Something about a building of books just gets my mind rolling. All that possibility in those carpeted aisles with the lady in the beehive and reading glasses glancing at those that would disturb the inner sanctum. The slightly harried younger woman working behind the front desk that are forever cataloging books or trying to find a missing library card because a mother and her kids are imploding.

Communities are defined by their libraries. It is one of the first things a town builds. And the biggest towns (Chicago) have incredible libraries. And it is hard to believe that world might go away. Maybe not be anytime soon, but the Ebook is the first foot in the door of a world where people don't have to leave home to go the library. The library as we know it with the cranky women keeping order and the pulpy smell of old books could well one day be reduced to a server.  A strange thought.

Amazon  just opened up the Kindle to libraries.That means people like myself can now zap a book into my reader at my kitchen table and never leave the house. The overwhelming advantage of the Kindle or any Ereader is one of convenience. It is simply easier to plunk a book out of thin air and read it. There is none of the driving to the bookstore or library and parking and paying for gas and searching out the book. You simply do it in seconds. This doesn't bode well for bookstores or libraries.

The faint erosion of library traffic will not be noticeable at first. There are simply too many people who prefer books. But as times passes, the people who grew up on Ereaders will not reach for a book the way we don't reach for an eight track tape or a  record. The medium has simply passed. And it is a sad thought that our collective isolation from technology might just spread to even our libraries.

I don't know. Even if all the books are gone, I'll still go to the library and walk the stacks. Me and the lady in the beehive with that sweater she is forever pulling together, looking over her glasses. Shhhhhhh. People are reading. For now anyway.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...one mans fight to get out of suburbia

Afternoon of an Author

You do it Stopping by a library for the Wifi connection you take a stroll in the stacks with your Kindle. Irony upon irony. You float along eyes scanning and the the H's begin and you see the first cover and then the next. It is your hometown library and they have multiple copies of all your books. And so you thumb that first one that you agonized over for seven years. It is well thumbed and someone has scribbled in pencil on the first page. Some of the pages are bent. The library pocket has your birthday stamped and followed by a dash How long until that final date?

The second book has been brutally abused. A good sign of anxious readers. The pages are even more worn, some turned back to mark a spot. Someone has dumped a glob of coffee that stained the cover page brown. You slip through the pages that took another seven years to produce. It is quiet in it's plastic cover that the small publisher had created but had now dimmed and turned to a yellowed plastic. The third novel looks like it just came off the shelf and has not seen the same action of the others. It was a quieter novel though more violent. The publisher had gone all  out and the author photo looks like that of a very prominent successful man of the literary world.

The fourth novel, your most recent has truly been abused. The cover is dog eared and coffee seems to have been dumped on several pages in wholesale quantities. Maybe jelly stains on a few other pages. There were more local references in this one so maybe people thumbed through quickly. The book already looks older than others but it is of a cheaper quality, more modern, less heft.

So you slide the books back and wonder what testament there will be to a person reading now. With a kindle there is none. You read and download another Very convenient, fast, changing that physical interaction. None of these old battle hardened soldiers of the public library. You wonder how long they will last now that the digital age of books is here.

You walk on. Your afternoon is almost over and it is time to go back to work. Just a little less enthusiasm as you open your computer. You sigh as your Kindle warms up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

From Scroll to Kodex to reading The New York Times in Wisconsin

Up in a cabin with nothing but my kindle I downloaded the NY Times and read Lev Grossmans piece on the limitations of the digital format versus what he called the the codex  (book) which evolved from the scroll. He says if anything we are not making enough of the change. He is right and he winds up his piece saying the constrictions of the digital format is it's undoing. He is right. You cannot go from the end to the beginning with the kind of ease of a book. You cannot find  a page you wanted and then shoot ahead and back again to the place you wanted to be. Ebooks are just harder to navigate and they do feel contained.

Saying that Grossman finishes up saying that he will stick with the book. It is everyones choice and I understand his frustration. Reading on the ereader is very different. You just don't have that physical book in your lap to tear to pieces and mark up and read and jump around in. It's almost like the story is caged and you can't quite get to it. But here is why the new medium trumps all. Convenience. Humans move to convenience like ships to water. I can think of no better example than sitting up in Wisconsin and reading Levs article and then the entire NY Times Sunday paper in a cabin in middle of the woods.

There was no way for me to do this at my in laws place before. The town five miles away had the Milwaukee Journal and if you drove further to a grocery store you could get the Chicago Tribune. But NY Times, no way. But I read Lev's piece and then Maureen Dowd and here was the big thing, I could drop it on the couch and then fall asleep and then pick up where I left off. I would have never read any of this without the ability to snatch the newspaper out of thin air.

And I have written about the limitation of reading the NY Times on the Kindle and I stand by preferring the paper over the digital. But there is no doubt that conveniencewill trump everything. We are only getting busier and more pressed for time. Going to a bookstore or to a grocery store will be a luxury we will pass on because it's just so much easier to sit in our cabin and start reading. The scroll gave way to the Codex for much the same reason. It was just so  much easier to read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Ebooks level the playing field for Authors

Mass market paperbacks are dying. This is due in large part to ebooks taking away the normal paperback buyer in airports, drugstores and those large racks that used to sit in front of department stores and every convenience store. My second novel came out in mass market and should have been trade. Tobacco Sticks went out the there as a literary courtroom drama set in the South in Virginia in 1946 and had to fight it out with spy novels, thrillers, slasher novels, mysteries and just about every mass genre out there. I had no choice in the matter and the publisher later admitted that trade would have been a better fit for the novel.

The beautiful thing about Ebooks is that the author is in control.  There is only one format and that levels the playing field. No longer is an author competing with hard covers, trade, or mass paperback. No longer is the author stuck in a format that doesn't fit because of publishing realities. The book goes out there as an Ebook and it is on the same footing as every other author. Bestseller or unknown, the reader will receive the same product without the stigma of mass versus trade versus hardcover.

And the book can stay out there. No publisher will remainder your title falling into the dreaded OUT OF PRINT STATUS. You book will not be pushed to the back of the store or worse not displayed at all. One copy will not be stocked while five hundred copies are stocked of other titles. Books will not be sent back to the publisher because they didn't sell out in the first month. The ebook revolution has put the author in the drivers seat finally.

So mass market paperbacks will disappear. Eventually hardcover will  probably go away. The big authors will dominate the ebook sites and will be pushed out there first, but the reader can search for the author he wants and there the book will be for all time in  electronic mass, trade, and hardcover glory. The authors best effort will be there without publisher interference. Can an author ask for anything more?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Reading on My Kindle...the Big Change is here

Yeah I have a library of books. Old yellowed dog-eared guys who taught me how to read and write when I was hacking it out in Chicago and starving above Thai restaurants in one room hovels that were sprayed by a maniac with a silver can like a gunfighter who shouted EXTERMINATOR and the roaches just laughed man. They just laughed and the exterminator never even saw the guy laying on his yellowed mattress with the book over his face reading  Kerouac, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Salinger...anybody he could get his hands on, tearing up those books with fingers smudged with coffee cake and staining pages with brown coffee and jelly and then they ended up in my shelf of books that are like touchstones next to my second Editions of Tales of the Jazz Age and Huckleberry Finn. Hard to believe that is all historical now.

But it is. Grabbed up the Kindle and have been reading it for about a week. Strange at first because I didn't have a book to mutilate and mark and scribble on and get eggs and coffee all over and throw in my backpack and then my car and then lose it under my bed or leave outside. Strange not to flip the pages and hear the sound and feel the texture and stare at the physical print. But reading THE HELP at a snails pace which is the way I read anyone I want to really see what they are doing, I started to forget about books. Which is weird because I never thought I would ever forget about my buddies I carried around on CTA buses and trains and plopped down on bakery floors and  security desks and shoved inside my leather coat.

But it is happening.

First of all I can always find the Kindle. It just sits on the kitchen counter and I pick it up and read in the morning before I write like I always do. And it just hangs around and I take it with me to the coffee shop and it is small in the backpack. I had been lugging Fitzgerald's uncollected stories around. A brick. I even carried around Twain's Autobiography for a while. A cannon ball. But the Kindle weighs nothing. And the book is there. I even downloaded music into it for when I get bored of reading.

But how is it really reading on this thing? It just is. You read and forget about it. The vehicle is here and the links are in the books and so reading will never be the same. I am a gadget freak and yeah I probably have rushed to judgement, but the brave new world of digitized books is here and aint no turning back. And the thing is you don't want too. It's all about the word right? The word is still there and even looks like the printed word. I just need to get a light which I skimped on so I can read in bed while the world sleeps.

And as for my friends in my library. They are still there and always will be. I will still read books. I might even lose the Kindle in the back of a bus or a taxi or maybe it will get rained on or just die. Who knows. But here is the deal, books are a part of you, be they digital or pulp. It's the story, right?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle  

Got the Kindle Finally!

All my books are available on Kindle (Kindle Books)so I figured I better go get one. I had been eyeing them for a while and when I went past the GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign on Borders I swung in and eyed their KOBOS and almost bought one for the low price of seventy bucks. But after talking to the salespeople who would soon be walking the streets they let me know in their own way the KOBO ereader was not so great. Well, it's kind of slow one saleswoman said in beneath her breath. Say no more. After asking about several books Borders didn't have I beat it out of there and headed for Best Buy where I bought my KINDLE!

I haven't read one book on it  yet but today is the day. But I went into my library to grab something and there were all my books. I usually don't even think about them but suddenly they looked antique. Don't get me wrong I will still be a book reader of pulp and circumstance. But I know the way I look at CD's or records that the old delivery vehicle is on a time limit. Books will not be relevant to my seven year old the way they were to me. It is just a fact.

And maybe because I had to wrestle with the kindle environment for the last few weeks (In Kindle Purgatory)getting by books out there that I came to understand more about the power of the digital word. Even going into Borders hit me differently. Of course Borders is going out of business. The brick and mortar modality of selling books is already behind the curve. Those books just sit on the shelf and don't say a word. I can shoot out my chapters to people and they may ignore them they may delete them they may block me, but I just did something pro active while the muted pulp sits on the shelf.

The word I got was that Borders got into the Ereader market too late and that was one of the reasons they went down like the Titanic. The truth is publishing is changing at nanosecond speed and authors bookstores and publishers are still adjusting. Whoops. My phone just went off. That was my Kindle newsletter. I guess it's time to open the box and fire up my ereader. Maybe I'll try The Help. Everyone is reading it and of course it is the book Borders did not have. Guess I'll just download it. There...Done.

William Hazelgrove Website
Rocket Man Kindle or Paperback

Catcher in the Rye for the Recession Generation....

In Kindle Purgatory

I own all the electronic rights to my books and so it is my responsibility to get them  out there ready to go for the Kindle users. I had someone else do it for a while until I realized I was shooting myself in the foot by hurting my royalties. So I took it on and entered Kindle purgatory. You now have the words that have been hammered in stone in your books and have been fine thank you very much for years. But now you have to wake them up and explain you are putting them into a different format and would they please behave for people who want to zap e-books into their readers.

Words being words they don't behave. They rebel. Excited by being released after years of being stuck between two dusty covers and fading into pulpy yellow has beens the words now are juiced. They strut across the screen and jump around like Mexican jumping beans. Even the title gets in the act and shoots from one side to the other. The epigraph jumps ship altogether and the dedication is found hiding in the far right corner of the first chapter. The first chapter has mutinied and takes its' place in the back as CHAPTER ONE.

Others follow suit and everyone gets in the act. It is word riot! Think London in the last few days. All the words start rioting and looting. They jump pages, get into other words paragraphs. Chapters poach on other chapters and retaliate by changing the chapters font. Headings head for the hills and page numbers go on strike. There is even some new words who have decided on acrobatics for a living and come in sideways on the margins. The Authors Page goes vertical and decides it would rather march across several pages than being stuck in one lousy paragraph. Author Photo decides he never liked his position all that much and chooses a page for himself and turns black.

So like a cop I take off after my errant words and corral them and bluff them and bride them and kick them in their butts to get them back to their rightful place. Some words have gone hardcore and take no prisoners sticking to their margins or sides like pirates on a gold ship. I have no alternative but to nuke them and start over. They dont' go easy and make a lot of hell for everyone else with page recalibration. Finally I get everyone where they are supposed to be and we go for the conversion.

Most of the words make it, but a few slip by and the Chapter Headings do the rumba with some on the bottom of the page and some on the top. I push everyone around with billy club and we do it again and most of the headings get in line and even the epigraph is fairly centered. I torch the unrepentant Author Page for a web link which like the new guy on the block is very responsive and respectful and does what he is told. The words grumble and show up for work on time and I let them out into cyberspace on the promise they will behave.

Then I turn to the next book and let the inmates out again. Of course they go crazy.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Paperback and Download

Rocket Man First Chapter

The Catcher in the Rye for the fortysomethings. Not quite boomers, five years old during Woodstock, missed the sixties revolution and ended up being mellow in the seventies, partied in the eighties, floated in the nineties, then lost it all in the Great Recession. Welcome to the world of Rocket Man.