Well, I have been getting my daily 5% of a novel reading done the last few days, and then some. It feels good. Last night I sat in the front room with my wife, the cat, and the dog. We watched (sort of) Around the World in 80 Days and I read on my Kindle. We talked and laughed. I read. It felt so much better that fiddling around on the web.
Reading is the best.
My prefered way of reading is still the Kindle. It is just so much easier on my eyes. The Kindle and eBooks from Amazon are really the only tie I have left with Amazon. It is very rare for me to order anything from them now, though I suppose they have the claws in everything. I ordered some shoes from Zappos last week – yep – Amazon. I also enjoy Twitch a lot, and I do subscribe to a couple of channels that I enjoy. Yep - Amazon.
I have very mixed feelings about Amazon. On the one hand the pandemic would have been a lot harder without Amazon. The company provided an incredibly useful service. We were very isolated as my wife was going through chemo during the worst part of the pandemic.
On the other hand, I don’t really love the idea of employees in warehouses having to pee in bottles due to their work expectations. I don’t like contributing to the income of a billionaire scumbag bootlicker. The truth is, however, that we live within this system, and we have to just do the best we can to get by and make good decisions when we can. Pick our battles, I suppose.
The other thing I hate about Amazon, and this is probably the case with other online book retailers, but is worse with Amazon, is the increasing number of AI slop books being produced. Amazon willingly allows this shit to continue. Worse – a real author publishes a book, then some scumbag scans it into an LLM and then uses the LLM to create “related” books which they sell for about a dollar. There are a million problems with that. Sadly I lack the means to kill all the LLM companies and imprison their owners/designers.
Last year I explored going to some other kind of eReader. I spent about an hour at a Barnes & Noble store clicking buttons and testing out a Nook. It was a greatly inferior device. Slow. Glitchy. Horrible user interface. I was disappointed, because while B&N is certainly not perfect, and is also run by business scumbags, I doubt that B&N employees are pissing in bottles and wearing leg irons. They opened – GASP – a brand new brick and mortar store about 3 minutes from my house, right in our neighborhood. We’ve shopped there. My wife buys and reads physical books, so it is great to have that store so close. It is nice to browse. It is nice to talk to the people who work there, like we did in the Before Times.
There is a certain locked-in feeling too. I have nearly 200 books on Kindle. It feels weird to think of moving to a different system, even though the truth is I’ll probably not re-read many, if any, of them. It reminds me of the pleasure you have of seeing your bookshelf full of books you have read, that takes up a lot of space, but man it is cool to look at. Truth is, of course, you really don’t own an eBook on Kindle or any of these other platforms really. I suppose if you download an ePub format book, keep it saved on a hard drive, and keep a reader than can download and read it, that might be “ownership.” But like so many of these digital media artifacts you really don’t own them like you do a physical artifact.
Now, every time I talk about wanting some non-Amazon eReader, people on social media chime in about this or that “superior” eReader. Here’s the thing. I just want to read the book. I don’t want to have to download it to the computer, convert it from some weird format possibly, transfer it to the device. The Poison of Convenience is a very strong poison, and I have been poisoned strongly.
But to immediately contradict myself, I do feel the pull of buying actual books. I mean, I have reading glasses. I am so - fucking - sick of supporting that is essentially a cloud-based streaming rental economic and creative ecosystem. THAT is why I’m so glad we never gave up or LPs or CDs. We never sold them. We buy new ones, and even better, now young people are tiring of the bullshit rental digital life as well. And with LLMs and the rest of the AI bullshit happening it is only getting worse. I feel like the only way to rebel, to have any sort of punk rock spirit, is to simply not participate. I am moving that way. It’s just rough because a lot of the books I read are 40 or 50 years old. I can download them to my Kindle in about 3 seconds, for 99 cents, or I can search the used bookstore and probably not find them, or I can order them from Amazon (see - we’re back to Amazon) or some other used book dealer and pay for postage, packaging that will might be recycled, and burn some gasoline having them delivered.
Life was simpler when I had good eyesight and there was no internet.
Ok, I need to stop typing now…