Reading - books or ereader (other kindles are available)!

[ColinJ]

i don't understand what you are saying here - folks are reading 100 year old ebooks now.*

Kindle books are facsimilies of real books. Not sure what your point is.

I think he is suggesting that a Kindle reading device might pack up by then. Completely irrelevant of course because the Kindle app is available for all of the major platforms and almost certainly WILL be around in 100 years time. I have the app on my Windows laptop, and my Android phone and tablet. My sister has an actual Kindle.

The Dickens novels that I downloaded last night are almost 200 years old now!

 

[Hebe]

I subscribe to scribd, which seems to give me all I can eat access to their selection of ebooks, audiobooks, sheet music, magazines for about £11/month ( there is a 30 day free trial). I think technically there probably is a per month limit but I haven’t hit it yet, and I use the app most days. It doesn’t run on kindle, I have the app on my iPad and phone, they synch very nicely between one another. The algorithm always seems to offer up interesting stuff and I can search by tag. If something isn’t grabbing me after the first few pages I just unsave it and move on to something else. The stock isn’t as universal as kindle or audible but I’ve never run out. I’ve listened to audiobooks by Anna McNuff and Felicity Cloake about their cycling journeys, Peter Walker about exercise, Under Milk Wood read by Richard Burton… assorted fiction, my current long listen is a treatise about the economics of paying for parking. The flat monthly fee means that I can try interesting looking books out without worrying about wasting any money. So I always try scribd first, I’ll go to Kindle after that, and I buy actual books secondhand from abebooks. Occasionally from real life bookshops too, the best bookshops are normally pretty good at recommending authors.

 

[Blue Hills]

Basically, you're playing in someone else's sandbox, when really, you shouldn't be.

Fanfic sits in a grey area in terms of copyright, so it can be frowned upon, and, if using more than a few lines of original text, can also be seen as plagiarism. Which is why most if not all pieces published online will have a disclaimer saying that XYZ belongs to author ABC and you're only borrowing the characters for a little while.

Because of that, fan fiction is strictly not-for-profit, which makes me wonder how 50 Shades got past the safety net.

Some authors and film / TV franchises actively encourage fan fiction (Star Trek in particular, who then ran a competition to get new authors in, and published the best stories in a series of books), whereas others will issue cease & desist orders regardless of how good the quality of the writing is.

I try to avoid most of the common pitfalls in my own fanfics (set in the Babylon 5 universe) by using mainly original characters and writing about events that lie parallel to the main story arc - alluded to in the series, but never touched.

There used to be a fan fiction dictionary on jumpnow.de which was incredibly useful, but the website has been defunct for a fey years now. It might still be available on some archive online somewhere

So the shades of grey characters already existed somewhere?

 

[Reynard]

So the shades of grey characters already existed somewhere?

I believe the characters themselves are original, but the universe the story is set in (Twilight) certainly exists. Though I've not watched the TV series (doesn't float my boat) and only managed two paragraphs of the first book, so I'm not exactly qualified to comment. I'm only going on what friends who have both watched and read have noticed.

But it does demonstrate how blurred the lines can sometimes be.

 

[annedonnelly]

A couple of people mentioned Ulysses earlier. According to this article the best way to read it is to skip the first three chapters. Though isn't it the final chapter that has no punctuation? I'd have to skip that one too.

 

[Time Waster]

@Legs and @Time Waster I think it's fantastic that your children are so into reading. Lots of reading must be good for them as they grow and develop.

I was always an avid reader too and I don't think it did me any harm.

I spent a lot of my primary school years reading factual books in my spare time. Particularly books on nature. I simply couldn't get on with fiction. No idea why. However the general knowledge gained from non fiction books got me into trouble. I got told off by a teacher in my second year in school when corrected her that technically there was such a thing as a dragon, a komodo Dragon is a very large lizard from the komodo islands of Indonesia. She told me off and said they didn't exist so I brought my nature book in the next day that showed them as even then I knew what's right and truth was important. So I didn't realise that she was protecting a timid girl who got scared at the idea dragons existed. Oops!

Anyway, books were my life in my primary years. As an adult I lost the patience to read books. Possibly because I had a spell of buying too ambitious books. Things like semi academic political book on the northern Irish troubles or the neolithic era technology. Seriously heavy and I've never finished them. I had 29 bought books that I simply couldn't get through at one point, still got them somewhere I think.

I'm slowly getting back into the reading habit following the initial shutdown. I realised that reading needs to be more about entertainment than education for me. It needs to grab my attention and interest. Lesson learnt after years with very little in the way of books read.

 

[Poacher]

I saw a photo of a komodo dragon eating a chicken, and thought it was breathing fire.
Also when primary school age.

 

[Time Waster]

Maybe you could point out that a Kindle e.ink screen is fundamentally different to a mobile/computer screen?

It's as much about the interaction with the device. Swipe, flick through, tweaking screen brightness/ text size, etc. Much more tablet like than books plus more things for young people to get distracted by rather than simply reading. I think that's the idea. Personally I do get that there's a difference between reading ebooks on devices than paper books. Whether that difference is enough to matter is simply an opinion of the reader.

 

[postman]

If I'm honest, both. I have plenty of books which I still read over and over, but the Kindle is great for older classics which are generally free, I think I've only ever paid for 1 book on the Kindle

Kindle is great for older classics,well thank you for such a wonderful compliment,i am touched.

 

[mustang1]

If you decide to get an e-book reader, my tip is to not get side-tracked with e-book software readers that you can get on your phone or tablet because there are too many distractions on those devices. Just get an e-book reader that does one thing: allow you to read books.

Some time later, I started reading e-books on my phone and tablet but it was never as good as a dedicated e-reader (both in terms of viewing the text and the distractions offered by my phone (you have a new text, you have a new email, you have a reminder, would you like to leave some feedback, you visited this place so leave us a review and all manner of rubbish.

 

[cougie uk]

One great thing about e-readers is that you can adjust the font size and colour for easy reading. No need to fumble around for reading glasses.
And there's thousands of books out of copyright so all of Dickens, Shakespeare - the Conan Doyle books to mention a few - cost nothing. I don't think Will will be complaining at his lost trevenue.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

One of the things about a kindle is that it uses very little power - especially the ones with no light
Therefore they do not need to charged very often.
A few years ago we went on holiday and I left my kindle on the plane - I could only get it back by going to the customs place at the actual airport and the rep was unhelpful.
Hence I was stuck with my phone and a small cheap tablet for the whole 2 weeks - both using the relevant app and getting the 2 devices to last all day was a pain - my wife's proper kindle lasted 2-3 days between charges.

 

[Hebe]

My route to today’s reading:
A podcast on active transport (can’t remember which one) led me to Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking (audiobook on Scribd app). This mentionned a novel with parking as the main theme - Calvin Trillin’s Tepper isn’t going out. This wasn’t on scribd or Amazon so I ordered it secondhand from abebooks for a couple of quid. It arrived today and turned out to be published by the in-house press of one of my preferred local real life bookshops. Which explains why I couldn’t find it on Amazon. My point is that book recommendations can come in from unexpected sources. Maybe look for podcasts/radio/YouTube channels on genres/subjects that you’re interested in?

 

[tyred]

One great thing about e-readers is that you can adjust the font size and colour for easy reading. No need to fumble around for reading glasses.
And there's thousands of books out of copyright so all of Dickens, Shakespeare - the Conan Doyle books to mention a few - cost nothing. I don't think Will will be complaining at his lost trevenue.

A bit of topic but on the subject of font size, just how did the Victorians read their books? They didn't have electric lights and probably few could afford to see an optician and get specs (and I'm sure a modern day optician could do much more to help with eye deterioration).

I've got a complete Sherlock Holmes picked up in a charity shop which is a true reprint of the originals as they appeared in the Strand Magazine with all the original illustrations. It's very nice but the text is truely tiny.

I also have an 1822 edition of the complete works of Robert Burns, again with unbelievably small type and this is true of most old books that I have seen. Even ones into the early to mid twentieth century had small type. I realise it was probably an attempt to economise when paper was probably more expensive but I can only read these books comfortably in good lighting. How they read in candlelight is beyond me (and yes I had an eye test last month).

 

[Reynard]

I have a 1903 edition of Tennyson's works, and yes, the print is tiny, but actually quite readable. I think it's as much the font type as the size that makes a difference, cos I don't need glasses to read the Tennyson, but I do need them to read some of the magazines and programmes I have in my archive of motor racing ephemera. Go figure...

Although mum, who is a lacemaker and has a keen interest in the history of the craft, says that to have more light, lacemakers of the time used to put a bowl of water in front of the candle, so I guess that's what people must've done to read, sew etc as well...