You'll have to pry my Kindle out of my cold, dead hands. (If I'm undead, hah, good luck.)
This isn't meant to be a screed about why you should or shouldn't purchase ebooks. This is all about me and all about my reading habits, my family's reading habits, and why I love ebooks. Don't take what I say as a universal truth, because I'm talking about me and my family. Though I will say that my post came on the heels of reading this post by 
elf, which made me think of why I love ebooks.
I come from a family that values reading. Like, before I was interested in boys (or girls, which was about eight years before I realized I was kind of interested in boys too), my first love was books. I could sit in my bedroom for HOURS reading fairy tales. The original fairy tales, those Brothers Grimm stories that were gruesome and bloody, or the incredibly depressing Andersen stories, those were the books that shaped my childhood (more than Disney ever did).
I collect books. As a child, the basement of our house had an entire wall of shelves, and they were mine, all mine, to fill up with as many books as I could. That...did not take long. I had to pick and choose what to keep and what to get rid of. (When you own the entirety of the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, Cherry Ames, Bobbsey Twins, and Vicki Vale mysteries, all in hardcover except the Trixie Belden books, plus you have a bunch of other books you've scrounged after your parents finished them or you bought them used at garage sales on your $1/week allowance, that's a heartbreaking procedure.) The shelves were so overloaded and I loved my books so much that my dad had to threaten to throw the books in the garbage to get me to actually sort through the books.
My mom and dad, they also read. My dad, who dropped out of college, has given himself the equivalent of a PhD in military history and economics, just because he reads so damn much. The man is scary smart, and draws connections between past and present, and past events and their further past events, that would boggle the average human being. He can talk about economic history and relate it to military actions from a hundred years ago. From two hundred years ago. This is a man who did blue collar manual labor for a living. This is my dad, the licensed plumber. We're not even getting into my mom and her self education in philosophy and literature, and in literary analysis. Because Dad is scary smart, but Mom is terrifying in her intellectual capacity. Because she read anything and everything she can get her hands on.
This is also how I could read Pyramid Power and Chariots of the Gods at age eleven and still manage to debunk the logic in them, even at an age where most of my friends were still on Sweet Valley High and the Babysitters Club books. Which is good and all, I'm not knocking SVH or BSC, because I love them and read them. But by the time I hit 7th grade, I was reading The Cat That Walked Through Walls. My hatred for Heinlein has been formed due to that book and Methuselah's Children, oh God, don't get me started. (No, seriously, don't.) I had read Dune for the first time at age eight, or maybe nine.
The reason I read so much? It wasn't because we made enough money for Mom and Dad to afford these books brand new every time, and this was back in the day when $6 for a mass market paperback was too much, and $7 meant that it should be at least a thousand pages, if not more. I remember weekly trips to the library and arguing with my parents that I should be allowed to check out a stack of books as tall as I was. I remember reading The Witches when it first came out, and being deliciously afraid (and thinking that it was rather unfair that the witches were all evil). I remember going to the bookstore and spending hours, and my mom coming out of there with two bags full of new books.
I got my college job at the book store because they knew my mom, because she'd been shopping there since before I was born. And then my entire paycheck went right back into purchasing books from the store. Even with the book lending program that employees had, I still bought enough books that my whole paycheck went back there, most weeks. (We had many people who worked there specifically to get an employee discount.)
We had books around. So many books. And we had to find a way to get these books out of there; otherwise, we'd have enough books to build furniture. They would fill up every nook and cranny in our house. So we took them to the used bookstore - until the nearby one closed. Then we started taking them to the library. Until the library stopped taking our books. Literally. They told my mom we brought them too many books and they couldn't take any more. I grew up in the second biggest city in my state, and the library system could not handle our load of books.
I mean, you realize how many books that is, right? When the public library literally refuses to take your books any more, because they can't handle the volume? Yeah.
When my uncles and aunts were in college, my mom would ship them three or four boxes of books, because they didn't have any money to buy books for themselves, and we had to get them out of our house. My relatives still remember the excitement they had when they got care packages full of nothing but the written word.
When I finished college, I wasn't making much money. I bought books when I could, not to mention traded in books for credit at used book stores. My mom would come to my apartment, and she'd bring me book. Not a dozen books at a time, but a dozen bags of books at a time. I would sort through them, perform literary triage (I'm so not even kidding), and then I'd have to find ways of getting rid of them. Sometimes I'd hand them off to friends. Sometimes I'd stick a pile of them in the foyer of my apartment building and tape up a "free books" sign. Sometimes I'd talk my mom into driving in with her car, filling the back seat and trunk with books, and hauling them all to the Brown Elephant thrift store. Or to Stars Our Destination for credit.
I was drowning in literature. Which, you know, sounds exactly like the awesome-yet-time-consuming fate that it really was. Which was why the advent of ebooks and ereaders make me thrilled.
I was reading ebooks back in the mid-90s with a PalmPilot. A four stinking megabyte PalmPilot. (Do you know the vast levels of excitement that I had when I upgraded to eight whole megs?) I would head to Project Gutenberg (or my favorite fanfic archive), download or copy/paste a text file, and then reformat that sucker to remove all the hard returns at the end of a line. Then I would have to reformat that text file to a .lit or .pdb file.
Then I would have to sync my PalmPilot with a special folder on my computer entitled, appropriately, "things to read." This being the mid-90s, this wasn't exactly an easy thing to do. (OH CLOUD, OH WIFI, HOW I LOVE YOU.) Then I would open the file on a special program on my PalmPilot that I had to go out and find on a CD, because we didn't have Android or iTunes app stores or bluetooth or WiFi back then, and I could read it. Sometimes, if it was too dark, I would turn the backlight on, and my battery would drain in a couple hours. Which was more than I could do without eyestrain anyway, you know?
I read Last of the Mohicans and War and Peace on my damn PalmPilot (such a small screen), along with Dracula, various Louisa May Alcott books, and at least three of the Wizard of Oz series, and those are only the ebooks that I can remember reading, because there are others I've forgotten, I'm sure. (Most of Stoker's books, other than Dracula, for example, are eminently forgettable.) Not to mention a fair number of X-Files, Highlander, and Forever Knight epics (and at least one epic series where someone had decided to cross all three of those shows over, which just didn't work out too well, trust me).
These days, I can open up my Kindle, go online without worry (I have 3G because I love easy internet access so much, and the web browser on my Kindle 3 is far less clunky than the web browser that I had on my Kindle 1), and either find something at Project Gutenberg that's pre-formatted for me (oh, Project Gutenberg, you have ALL MY LOVE), or I can go and buy something at Amazon easily. Or I can get free stuff all over the place. Or use Instapaper to read fanfic, or download it directly to my Kindle from the ao3. I can buy things elsewhere and email them to myself, if I make sure it's something that's not stupidly DRMed (bless you, Baen, seriously).
My Kindle is on a shared account. It's me, both my parents, two or three of my aunts, and Mr. Havoc will be getting his very own (used) Kindle 3 for Hanukkah, all on the same account. (Shh, don't tell him!) When I upgraded to a Kindle 3, I sold my Kindle 1 to my cousin's 4th grade daughter for a nominal fee. When the Kindle 1 died a terrible death, our shared Kindle account made Amazon love us so much that they let Mom purchase a brand new Kindle 3 for my cousin's daughter. And they charged us $65. This is back when you could blow $180 on a Kindle 3.
We have 1600 books on that account, and we're still adding books. Amazon fucking well loves my family. We're their target market. We like books. We buy books. Lots of books. Some of them are cheap, and some of them are expensive.
I still buy hard copy books, and I don't buy all of them from Amazon, that's for sure. But I try to buy them used, because the hard copy books I want (I share my dad's love of history and my mom's love of classic works of literature) aren't often available on the Kindle, and they're expensive. I mean, take the book Arthurian Literature by Women: An Anthology. No Kindle version! The hardcover is $100 when purchased directly from Amazon. HOLY FUCK. The paperback is $37, again, when purchased directly from Amazon. The used copy is $2.50. I'm very sorry the editors of the anthology aren't getting any royalties. But they wouldn't anyway, because I don't often spend $37 on a book.
And then you have things like A History of Mathematics: From Mesopotamia to Modernity. The hardcover is $85, and the Kindle edition has a lovely discount, down to $76.50. This would be the perfect gift book for my dad, math and history all rolled up into one. The man loves his interdisciplinary books. Not to mention that I could also read that. (I'm still waiting for him to finish hard copy book of the history of the Medici family that I got for him, because I want to steal it and read it myself.)
I am so not in a million years going to be purchasing that book. I probably won't ever even get a used copy, because it's $36.50 when used.
I buy new books when I can, of course, electronically and in hard copy. I buy a fair number of used books too. I get free books quite often as well. But I'm still trying to clear my bookcases enough that I can fit things on them. Half Price Books and Goodwill get a lot of stuff from me, even now.
Books are my first love. I'm not giving them up. Honestly, nothing's going to stop me from reading. Nothing. But if someplace can make it easier on me, if they can make it convenient, and time-saving, and, most importantly, if they can make it so I don't have to move hundreds of books in and out of my house, they will have my business. That includes Amazon, various ebook retailers, and fandom, who give and give and give when they write fanfic, and the thing the expect in return is love and squee. And you know what? I'm happy to give that back.
One postscript to this whole thing: Take all the complaints you have about Amazon being evil overlords and post them someplace that's not here, okay? This is not a post for telling me how Amazon wants to take over the world. Or how Amazon wants to drive everyone in the book market out of business but them. All big corporations want to take over the world. All big corporations want monopolies. All big corporations want to treat their employees like as much shit as they can get away with. I know that. When I was growing up, I got ALL THE LECTURES on economic theory, monopolies, causes of the Great Depression, and so many other things, most of which fueled some other bad thing that happened, which fueled some other bad thing that happened. I get it. I'm a flawed human being living in a flawed world, and I can either read lots of shit on my Kindle (which doesn't have to be just stuff purchased from Amazon), or I can stop buying books because the eleven bookcases in my house are overflowing and I can't fit any more books in the house. And I'm not going to stop buying books.
ETA: Also, I was considering a Kindle Touch 3G, but now they're disabling web browsing on the Kindle Touch 3G, to which I say: What's the point of you, then? Meh.
This entry has been cross-posted to Dreamwidth (
comments). Comments are welcome on either post.
elf, which made me think of why I love ebooks.
I come from a family that values reading. Like, before I was interested in boys (or girls, which was about eight years before I realized I was kind of interested in boys too), my first love was books. I could sit in my bedroom for HOURS reading fairy tales. The original fairy tales, those Brothers Grimm stories that were gruesome and bloody, or the incredibly depressing Andersen stories, those were the books that shaped my childhood (more than Disney ever did).
I collect books. As a child, the basement of our house had an entire wall of shelves, and they were mine, all mine, to fill up with as many books as I could. That...did not take long. I had to pick and choose what to keep and what to get rid of. (When you own the entirety of the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, Cherry Ames, Bobbsey Twins, and Vicki Vale mysteries, all in hardcover except the Trixie Belden books, plus you have a bunch of other books you've scrounged after your parents finished them or you bought them used at garage sales on your $1/week allowance, that's a heartbreaking procedure.) The shelves were so overloaded and I loved my books so much that my dad had to threaten to throw the books in the garbage to get me to actually sort through the books.
My mom and dad, they also read. My dad, who dropped out of college, has given himself the equivalent of a PhD in military history and economics, just because he reads so damn much. The man is scary smart, and draws connections between past and present, and past events and their further past events, that would boggle the average human being. He can talk about economic history and relate it to military actions from a hundred years ago. From two hundred years ago. This is a man who did blue collar manual labor for a living. This is my dad, the licensed plumber. We're not even getting into my mom and her self education in philosophy and literature, and in literary analysis. Because Dad is scary smart, but Mom is terrifying in her intellectual capacity. Because she read anything and everything she can get her hands on.
This is also how I could read Pyramid Power and Chariots of the Gods at age eleven and still manage to debunk the logic in them, even at an age where most of my friends were still on Sweet Valley High and the Babysitters Club books. Which is good and all, I'm not knocking SVH or BSC, because I love them and read them. But by the time I hit 7th grade, I was reading The Cat That Walked Through Walls. My hatred for Heinlein has been formed due to that book and Methuselah's Children, oh God, don't get me started. (No, seriously, don't.) I had read Dune for the first time at age eight, or maybe nine.
The reason I read so much? It wasn't because we made enough money for Mom and Dad to afford these books brand new every time, and this was back in the day when $6 for a mass market paperback was too much, and $7 meant that it should be at least a thousand pages, if not more. I remember weekly trips to the library and arguing with my parents that I should be allowed to check out a stack of books as tall as I was. I remember reading The Witches when it first came out, and being deliciously afraid (and thinking that it was rather unfair that the witches were all evil). I remember going to the bookstore and spending hours, and my mom coming out of there with two bags full of new books.
I got my college job at the book store because they knew my mom, because she'd been shopping there since before I was born. And then my entire paycheck went right back into purchasing books from the store. Even with the book lending program that employees had, I still bought enough books that my whole paycheck went back there, most weeks. (We had many people who worked there specifically to get an employee discount.)
We had books around. So many books. And we had to find a way to get these books out of there; otherwise, we'd have enough books to build furniture. They would fill up every nook and cranny in our house. So we took them to the used bookstore - until the nearby one closed. Then we started taking them to the library. Until the library stopped taking our books. Literally. They told my mom we brought them too many books and they couldn't take any more. I grew up in the second biggest city in my state, and the library system could not handle our load of books.
I mean, you realize how many books that is, right? When the public library literally refuses to take your books any more, because they can't handle the volume? Yeah.
When my uncles and aunts were in college, my mom would ship them three or four boxes of books, because they didn't have any money to buy books for themselves, and we had to get them out of our house. My relatives still remember the excitement they had when they got care packages full of nothing but the written word.
When I finished college, I wasn't making much money. I bought books when I could, not to mention traded in books for credit at used book stores. My mom would come to my apartment, and she'd bring me book. Not a dozen books at a time, but a dozen bags of books at a time. I would sort through them, perform literary triage (I'm so not even kidding), and then I'd have to find ways of getting rid of them. Sometimes I'd hand them off to friends. Sometimes I'd stick a pile of them in the foyer of my apartment building and tape up a "free books" sign. Sometimes I'd talk my mom into driving in with her car, filling the back seat and trunk with books, and hauling them all to the Brown Elephant thrift store. Or to Stars Our Destination for credit.
I was drowning in literature. Which, you know, sounds exactly like the awesome-yet-time-consuming fate that it really was. Which was why the advent of ebooks and ereaders make me thrilled.
I was reading ebooks back in the mid-90s with a PalmPilot. A four stinking megabyte PalmPilot. (Do you know the vast levels of excitement that I had when I upgraded to eight whole megs?) I would head to Project Gutenberg (or my favorite fanfic archive), download or copy/paste a text file, and then reformat that sucker to remove all the hard returns at the end of a line. Then I would have to reformat that text file to a .lit or .pdb file.
Then I would have to sync my PalmPilot with a special folder on my computer entitled, appropriately, "things to read." This being the mid-90s, this wasn't exactly an easy thing to do. (OH CLOUD, OH WIFI, HOW I LOVE YOU.) Then I would open the file on a special program on my PalmPilot that I had to go out and find on a CD, because we didn't have Android or iTunes app stores or bluetooth or WiFi back then, and I could read it. Sometimes, if it was too dark, I would turn the backlight on, and my battery would drain in a couple hours. Which was more than I could do without eyestrain anyway, you know?
I read Last of the Mohicans and War and Peace on my damn PalmPilot (such a small screen), along with Dracula, various Louisa May Alcott books, and at least three of the Wizard of Oz series, and those are only the ebooks that I can remember reading, because there are others I've forgotten, I'm sure. (Most of Stoker's books, other than Dracula, for example, are eminently forgettable.) Not to mention a fair number of X-Files, Highlander, and Forever Knight epics (and at least one epic series where someone had decided to cross all three of those shows over, which just didn't work out too well, trust me).
These days, I can open up my Kindle, go online without worry (I have 3G because I love easy internet access so much, and the web browser on my Kindle 3 is far less clunky than the web browser that I had on my Kindle 1), and either find something at Project Gutenberg that's pre-formatted for me (oh, Project Gutenberg, you have ALL MY LOVE), or I can go and buy something at Amazon easily. Or I can get free stuff all over the place. Or use Instapaper to read fanfic, or download it directly to my Kindle from the ao3. I can buy things elsewhere and email them to myself, if I make sure it's something that's not stupidly DRMed (bless you, Baen, seriously).
My Kindle is on a shared account. It's me, both my parents, two or three of my aunts, and Mr. Havoc will be getting his very own (used) Kindle 3 for Hanukkah, all on the same account. (Shh, don't tell him!) When I upgraded to a Kindle 3, I sold my Kindle 1 to my cousin's 4th grade daughter for a nominal fee. When the Kindle 1 died a terrible death, our shared Kindle account made Amazon love us so much that they let Mom purchase a brand new Kindle 3 for my cousin's daughter. And they charged us $65. This is back when you could blow $180 on a Kindle 3.
We have 1600 books on that account, and we're still adding books. Amazon fucking well loves my family. We're their target market. We like books. We buy books. Lots of books. Some of them are cheap, and some of them are expensive.
I still buy hard copy books, and I don't buy all of them from Amazon, that's for sure. But I try to buy them used, because the hard copy books I want (I share my dad's love of history and my mom's love of classic works of literature) aren't often available on the Kindle, and they're expensive. I mean, take the book Arthurian Literature by Women: An Anthology. No Kindle version! The hardcover is $100 when purchased directly from Amazon. HOLY FUCK. The paperback is $37, again, when purchased directly from Amazon. The used copy is $2.50. I'm very sorry the editors of the anthology aren't getting any royalties. But they wouldn't anyway, because I don't often spend $37 on a book.
And then you have things like A History of Mathematics: From Mesopotamia to Modernity. The hardcover is $85, and the Kindle edition has a lovely discount, down to $76.50. This would be the perfect gift book for my dad, math and history all rolled up into one. The man loves his interdisciplinary books. Not to mention that I could also read that. (I'm still waiting for him to finish hard copy book of the history of the Medici family that I got for him, because I want to steal it and read it myself.)
I am so not in a million years going to be purchasing that book. I probably won't ever even get a used copy, because it's $36.50 when used.
I buy new books when I can, of course, electronically and in hard copy. I buy a fair number of used books too. I get free books quite often as well. But I'm still trying to clear my bookcases enough that I can fit things on them. Half Price Books and Goodwill get a lot of stuff from me, even now.
Books are my first love. I'm not giving them up. Honestly, nothing's going to stop me from reading. Nothing. But if someplace can make it easier on me, if they can make it convenient, and time-saving, and, most importantly, if they can make it so I don't have to move hundreds of books in and out of my house, they will have my business. That includes Amazon, various ebook retailers, and fandom, who give and give and give when they write fanfic, and the thing the expect in return is love and squee. And you know what? I'm happy to give that back.
One postscript to this whole thing: Take all the complaints you have about Amazon being evil overlords and post them someplace that's not here, okay? This is not a post for telling me how Amazon wants to take over the world. Or how Amazon wants to drive everyone in the book market out of business but them. All big corporations want to take over the world. All big corporations want monopolies. All big corporations want to treat their employees like as much shit as they can get away with. I know that. When I was growing up, I got ALL THE LECTURES on economic theory, monopolies, causes of the Great Depression, and so many other things, most of which fueled some other bad thing that happened, which fueled some other bad thing that happened. I get it. I'm a flawed human being living in a flawed world, and I can either read lots of shit on my Kindle (which doesn't have to be just stuff purchased from Amazon), or I can stop buying books because the eleven bookcases in my house are overflowing and I can't fit any more books in the house. And I'm not going to stop buying books.
ETA: Also, I was considering a Kindle Touch 3G, but now they're disabling web browsing on the Kindle Touch 3G, to which I say: What's the point of you, then? Meh.
This entry has been cross-posted to Dreamwidth (
comments). Comments are welcome on either post.