Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
From Diego Basch:
Since I got my first Kindle my reading habits started to change. That was a few years ago, so the change has been very gradual. Here are some differences:
A few years ago I might finish a book and not have another one in the pipeline. I would start watching a TV series, which would occupy my spare time for a while.. . . .
Now my Kindle is filled with unread books, so when I finish one I naturally start another one. As a result I haven’t watched TV in a couple of years. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with watching TV, it just turns out that I find reading more relaxing.
The Kindle is not a device; it’s a platform. Besides the device itself, I use Kindle for Android, for the Mac, and even for the iPad sometimes. A great feature of the platform is that it synchronizes to the last page you’ve read on any connected device. Of course I prefer to read on the Kindle, and on a rainy day like today I may spend several hours with it in bed or the couch. If I’m at work and a meeting finishes early, I may stay in the room and continue reading a book on my laptop. When my wife goes to the bathroom at a restaurant, I can either check Twitter or read a couple of pages on the phone. As a result, I go through books much faster than I used to.
I’m starting to buy books based on their availability on the Kindle store. Last week I was trying to choose my next book. The one I wanted the most only had a hardcover version, so I “postponed” reading it. I can’t wait for all books to have electronic versions. Obviously for some the printed medium matters, but for the vast majority (in my opinion) it doesn’t.
I’ve begun to see printed books as deadweight, a burden to carry. I do not have a bookcase anymore, and during my last move I gave away all but a few of my printed books. It used to be very rare for me to re-read a book. It’s happening more often now that I see them on the home page of my Kindle.
Link to the rest at dbasch’s posterous
Ain’t it the truth?
With the Kindle, my buying habits have also changed. No towering TBR stack to dust or make me feel guilty. No books scattered throughout the house or piling up on the bedside table to start the kids in about my “hoard.” I’m subscribed to amazon and several authors’s newsletters so I find out when new books go on sale. Under five bucks– 1-click!
My biggest weakness is short fiction. .99 cent stories are better than chocolate. I am falling in love with short stories all over again and discovering a lot of really good writers to boot. My only gripe is that I wish authors of collections would do a better job across the board of clickable Tables of Contents. There is also plenty of room for a short description of the stories along with the title to help those of us with minds like steel colanders to find a favorite again.
Another thing I’ve noticed. The social aspect. Friends with Kindles who are like me, willing to give just about anything a shot if it’s inexpensive. Now when I say, “Try this one,” there’s no bother about going to the library or the bookstore. 1-click and we’re reading the same book.
Clickable Table of Contents, eh? Tell me mooooore…. (I’m probably going to do a collection of my short stories this coming year.)
Yeah, the need for a clickable TOC was a surprise for me when I first made my novel into an e-book–what adult novel even has a table of contents nowadays? But if you don’t include one, it’s almost impossible to navigate the book, because with an e-reader you can only turn one page at a time.
How I do it is I convert the file to HTML, and then I get in there with an HTML editor (I use NVU, which is free) and make anchor links between the table of contents and the actual chapter headings (and then I convert to ePub and Mobi). That way when you click on “Chapter 12″ in the TOC, you go to Chapter 12 in the book.
I really appreciate it when authors of short story collections or anthologies provide a clickable Table of Contents. I really, really appreciate those who realize maneuvering through an ebook is different than leafing through a print book and give short descriptions of the stories along with the titles.
It is a pain to do them, but you can use internal links/bookmarks in Word that will only cause you to tear part of your hair out if you go through Smashwords. In HTML they translate well into Mobi for Amazon. The extra effort pays off in value for the reader (this reader anyway).
That’s good to know about Smashwords–I’ve always just labeled the chapters “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” etc., so Smashwords automatically creates the TOC, but I’ve wondered what would happen with a book (like a collection of short stories) where you need to title sections differently.
I was a bit annoyed by Smashwords when I couldn’t have a Very Short ToC at the front that went, essentially, “Jump to a Chapter; Start at the Beginning; About the Author.” Jump to a Chapter went to the end of the book, and had the full “Chapter One, Chapter Two,” etc. thing. I was trying to pander to both “just let me start the book already” people and people who are on readers which need to be able to jump to chapters.
Oh, well.
(I actually have no problem with using the internal links in Word for Smashwords. It’s a little tedious, but it’s very simple. I then tweak the file as needed for Amazon, upload to the Kindlizer, yoink the HTML it generates, tweak that a little (because it does not generate clean HTML in a few ways!), and upload that instead.
I am the only person I know of who looks blankly at the screen when other people are complaining about Word-formatting for Smashwords. I always find it trivial!)
Soooo, short descriptions of the stories — a paragraph? a few words? *she asked, with ulterior purposes*
It just so happens, ABeth, I wrote up a post about this topic.
http://jwmanus.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/adventures-in-self-publishing-making-ereader-navigation-easier-for-readers/
I’m still a fan of Jutoh, which makes it easy to tweak a TOC and automatically creates one.
Scrivener does a good job too.
The fact that he no longer watches television demonstrates that books are competing with ALL media, and that the potential audience for e-books is much bigger than the current audience for paper books.
Jaye, I wish clickable table of contents were easier to do–I can do them fine now, but there was a real learning curve for me (editing HTML was not a skill I ever really wanted to learn).
Hunh. That never occurred to me, and I’m glad people mentioned it. My book doesn’t have names or anything for the chapters, just “Chapter One” and the like.
But I like to work in individual chapter files, and regard the HTML version as final. When I discovered that Calibre would join the files together I was ecstatic. I created a “header” HTML file with just links to the individual HTML chapter files, and fed it to Calibre. Lo and behold, a complete book — plus a table of contents. And since the header file was links, it came out clickable.
I thought it was silly. Why does fiction need a ToC? So I laboriously fitted all my chapters into One Big File, which I despise, and converted that. But if people like it, that’s great — it means I can go back to my preferred method.
Regards,
Ric
I totally get where this guy’s coming from when it comes to print books. I’ve given away a hundred or more books in the last few months. And I’m going to get rid of most of the rest of my printed books in the next several weeks. I’m getting transferred to Pearl Harbor (poor me, right?
) and now that I’m reading ebooks I see the printed copies as a space hog. And as a LOT of weight to move around. The Navy pays for our move because it’s a PCS, but up to a maximum weight limit. Getting rid of several hundred tomes will help us not exceed that maximum. That also lets us get rid of some old book cases, which will not only reduce our moving weight but also open up more wall space for keepsake pictures and art. It’s all upside. 
[...] started with a head’s up post from PG over on The Passive Voice blog leading to dbasch’s blog where he talks about how Amazon has drastically changed the way [...]