Yesterday's comments about electronic publishing have given me pause. I have always thought of e-publishing as an "in addition to" option, not an "instead of" one.
I do not own a Kindle or an iPad. Even though I write on my laptop, I read books, and I always envision my own as holdable, turnable, bendable, losable objects. It's hard for me to imagine publishing in a format that I have never used myself.
Moreover, I care deeply about the purities of book and page design. If I were to self-publish a book, I would need to spend a significant amount of time on those elements. I would not be able to download text into a predesigned template and call that a book. What looks beautiful on a page does not necessarily look beautiful on a screen and vice versa.
I'm not dismissing your suggestions; I'm just nonplussed.
(By the way, I also still listen to records on a record player.)
Last night's dinner: Maine bouillabaisse. Stock ingredients: onions, garlic, tomato, thyme, bay leaf, saffron, salt, smelts, water, boiled together for a half-hour and then pressed through a sieve. Fish ingredients: hake, haddock, scallops, mussels, steamers (fish and scallops diced, shellfish still in the shell), all dropped into the boiling strained stock and cooked for 5 minutes. Served with tiny sourdough rolls and a mixed lettuce salad. Afterwards we watched hockey.
3 comments:
I don't own a Kindle or iPad either; I love the physical book in the hand too much. And because I collect artists' books and fine press books, I can't bring myself to purchase the electronics.
I do think, however, that e-books will have their day eventually, that it is only a matter of time before the quality improves enough that people will begin converting without looking back, especially if they grow up without knowing traditional print. Either that or we'll run out of trees for paper.
I went with POD but because I had to use Microsoft Word (no fancy publishing program) there was no way to approach professional design quality. I haven't done Kindle because, my understanding is, verse does not translate well at all to e-readers.
There's no doubt that books depend on papermills and trees, but e-readers depend on factories and electricity. It's hard for me to see e-readers as "greener" than books.
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