Resisting Change: Ebooks vs. Real books.

February is coming to a close now and I am looking at my coffee table and on it are sat a few books and my Amazon Kindle.

This has got me thinking about where we are going with ebooks and I began to feel a little afraid that in ten years the ebook will have taken over. I got my Kindle from my parents at Christmas 2011 and when I first opened it the first thought I am sad to say was not "wow, this is a great present!!!", but was, I am ashamed to say "do you really know me? Why not get me Star Wars on Blu Ray???".

The thing was that my dad and I had bought my mother one for her birthday as they were going somewhere in Africa and it was easier than my mum having to take a number of books with her and filling their suitcase. I set it up for her and was impressed by it and thought that it was easy to read the text for great lengths of time in comparison to a normal computer screen that makes my eyes hurt after a time.

The thing for me though is that whilst I think of it as useful when travelling or you are on the go as it were if I am going to be sat on my sofa at home with a cup of peppermint tea and a biscuit I would much rather have a physical book.

I strongly believe that the written word is one of mankind's greatest inventions (or a discovery perhaps?) as it allows us to express ourselves in a way that we cannot sometimes express when talking and we can record things which led to the great Herodotus writing his Histories and creating the art from which his book is named.
Anyway, I'm going off topic there.

I thought that I should get a book on my Kindle to try it out and so I bought World War 2.1 by John Birmingham as I had always wanted to give alternative history a try but had never seen the book in a shop and I was too impatient to wait for delivery. 20 seconds later I had the book on my Kindle and started to read. It was a great story and I was then able to easily buy the next two in the series and apart from the fact that it doesn't give me page numbers but instead percent which annoys me as that doesn't always change every page as the percent hasn't changed I was sold.

Until I went to SFX3 in Wales....

I went there and I was determined to meet Jonathan Green, the author of the Pax Britannica novels. I met him and had a brilliant chat with him and got all of my books signed. Behind him was a sign that said that you could get all of the Abaddon books for £22 and they would put them on your Kindle there and then (I had mine in my bag). This is when it hit me. In ten years, if I look at my Kindle, will I think when I look at the book that I met the author/s?

No.

I left SFX with nearly a hundred pounds of books (there were many deals) some of which have not been published yet. Most of the books are from Angry Robot Publishers and all but one are signed. I even bought some books that I had no interest in just because I had nice chats (or a few pints) with the author on the day or the night before. I cannot guarantee that I will always remember the conversations that I had with the likes of the wonderful Guy Haley, Ian Whates, Jonathan Green, Dan Abnett and David Tallerman, but the second I open their books and read what they have written, my imagination will be transported back to when I spoke to them and the enjoyment that I had.

Jonathan Green and Guy Haley

David Tallerman

Ian Whates

It is for this reason that I always write a message in the front of any book I give as a gift so that that person will always remember the reason that I got them the book, and in years to come if the book passes to a new owner for any reason then the new owner will get a feeling, no matter how small, of what the book had meant in the past.  

Whilst I might be a science fiction fan, I do not want to walk into a library in the future for it just to be banks of data servers with digital books in, even if that makes information even easier to get a hold of. I know that it seems a bit simple of me to say that I don't like my Kindle because I cannot be emotionally invested in it the way I can be with a real physical book, but I don't think I will change on this. I realise that at the age of 24 it is difficult to move round my flat because of the 700+ books on the shelves (which will only get worse over time I imagine) and that my training as a classicist might mean I prefer old things to new things sometimes, but sometimes maybe change is bad. whilst I prefer mp3 and have been a supporter of them whilst everyone else was investing in mini disks because they saved space (I still cannot believe that my first mp3 player was from Sony, the size of a lighter and over £200), books are different.

Maybe I should start asking authors to sign my Kindle? But then eventually the Kindle will improve more or a different make will replace it and then it will become like my old mp3 player, stuffed in a drawer somewhere because my iPhone is better for the time being. Books will never become outdated, and they can represent moments in our lives and bring them back to us in a way no ebook could ever manage. 

Please let me know if your views on this, as whilst it may seem like I have drawn my line in the sand, I am still conflicted over this issue.

Thank you

John 

All photos taken by me :-)

Embedded by Dan Abnett

WAR!

When I think of war in books there are only two authors names that pop into my mind. Karen Traviss of Star Wars and Gears of War fame whose real life experience of war correspondence leads to very chilling and great writing. Secondly there is Dan Abnett.

Dan Abnett is mostly famous in my mind for his Warhammer 40,000 novels centred around Gaunts Ghosts and most recently his brilliant books Horus Rising and Prospero Burns in which Abnett paints a very grim and yet brilliant picture of how whilst war is terrible, betrayal is worse.

A few weeks ago I was able to meet Dan Abnett and I purchased his newest book which is being published by Angry Robot Publishers whom I must admit I had not heard of previously but was aware of several titles under their umbrella.

My Score: 3.5 out of 5
Read Again? Yes

My favourite part of the book: Many of the soldiers and reporters have implants that mean that when they swear the implant overrides their speech and makes them say "Freek" instead in order to not have swearing on the news.

Review:  In Embedded it follows a reporter named Lex Falk who is sent to colony planet 86 (not yet old enough to decide on a name) to investigate and report on unrest that has been developing there. In this universe created by Abnett, the cold war continued to rage but because mankind could spread out into the stars, open war never happened. Lex Falk is one of the most reputable names in the business and the military wants to show him things so that he will report that the unrest is not as bad as the hearsay. 

I wont go any more into the book because that would reveal too many spoilers and I don't want to ruin the book for anyone. I did enjoy this book and the world and the technology that Abnett has created are very believable as if humanity hasn't really invented anything truly game changing other than interstellar flight but things have been greatly improved on. The only downside of this is that it takes a long time to develop this world and you are introduced to a great many characters who are set up as being of great importance but yet are then rarely mentioned or I found it difficult to care about them. 

I found it difficult to get into the book and reach the point where I could not put it down, but in the final few chapters when all the aspects of the book finally come together it is a brilliant book. The reason I give it 3.5 is because once this happens and you begin to care about the characters the book abruptly ends and leaves the reader wanting more. I will read it again as I felt that I missed things the first time through and it is well worth a read and whilst I cant see there being a second book I would like to see more written in this universe as it truly is remarkable. Give it a read and you may not like all of it, but you will be very satisfied with the overall work.

My next review will be Empire State by Adam Christopher  

First step of my blogging experiment....

Hello all, my name is John and I've decided to start my first blog.

A little about me first. Recently I've been hitting some hurdles in my life that have made me realise that I needed something to keep my mind active and something for me to work on. I hit a major setback a few months ago when I discovered that the woman that I was very in love with had been cheating on me. Whilst that was a rather annoying setback, it also all came about the week before I was to hand in my masters degree thesis.

I've spent the past few months rebuilding my confidence and generally getting on with my life as anyone else does in these circumstances. One thing I found when I finished my degree was that I had time again to do the things that I really wanted to do but had been putting to one side out of guilt, as the little voice in my head was always saying "shouldn't you be working???".

Well my degree was in classics so one thing I had spent a great deal of time doing had been reading so it is very nice to be able to read normal books again and then I thought, why not write about them.

And that brought me to this.

So here we go, I know that at the moment I am the only person to be reading this, but hopefully I might get a follower or two in the future.

My first review which will be following shortly will be Dan Abnett's book Embedded from Angry Robot Books.

Thanks

John

 

Image taken from http://angryrobotbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Embedded-new-72dpi-198x300.jpg