Just reading my kindle… #amreading #books???? #kindle #catsofinstagram #catsagram #cats #Arthur #donottellhimhewasnamedafteramouse

But really, does the smartphone do all of things?

Again, really? Really?!? Apps and webserving? Yes, but do enough and you’ll soon find yourself wanting more. Books? Again, yes but the pages are small. Camera? Yes the quality is getting better and better but it still limits you with what you can, and so often with not even as much functionally as the old instamatic cameras of old. And they play your music too…

But here’s the thing. The largest, high-end, smartphone takes what 64GB tops. Most are much smaller, 16GB if you’re lucky or less, and that you have to keep all your apps, browsing cache, pictures, ringtones, documents… everything! Before you get to music storage.  My iPod takes 80GB of music and its pretty much full – my entire music collection. Unless you enjoy wrestling with the unweildy beast that is iTunes (and who does?) to decide what you might want to listen too and sync your music regularly then its simply not enough space.  And if you do like syncing your music daily, well, surely you might find i easier to go back to CDs. If I’m going to store my music on any device, then I want to store all my music on said device.

Some might counter this argument with saying, well you can store it in the cloud. Yes, yes you can, but that’s only going to work if you can get to the cloud. I’ve been using buses quite alot recently, and i’ve noticed that even when they offer free wifi in places itsnot seamless and straightforward and can cannot be replied upon for speed of access. Mobile internet too is, or can be, flaky at the best of times, and costly too.

And what of batteries. It may be nice to just carry one pocket-sized device with you but if you are using it intensively then the batteries going to be exhausted faster. And then what do you have? I like to have my dedicated devices: my camera, my tablet, my iPod, my phone, and my kindle (or actually, probably, more often than not, a book.

So for me, no the end is not nigh for my iPod. In fact I might need to uprade to a bigger one!

I don’t see Kindles (or the like) as an either/or for real books. I will never, ever, stop buying and/or reading paper books. After spending the best part of the back end of last year reading more or less exclusively on my Kindle, I’m really enjoying reading two *real* books at the moment (a novel, and a book of essays by my favourite author). I really don’t think that the Kindle is going to change my book-buying habits.

Industry pundits seem to be predicting that even the days of the relatively newcomver of the traditional eReader are numbered. I’m really not so sure. I own a second generation Kindle which is brilliant for reading on as its really comfortable. It’s what I get The Grauniad downloaded to every day. Recently I also acquired a Kindle Fire, which is to all intents and purposes an iPad Mini but cheaper. One of my first surprises is that it is pretty comfortable to read even though it has a backlit screen, but has a battery life of only hours (about a day), rather than weeks (or even a month) of my second generation Kindle.

Thus, for me, the Kindle Fire could never replace the traditional eInk Kindle, just as it will never replace the paper book. I love them all, and use them all, each according to their purpose and my need.

Basically I love it. I do have two slight gripes with it. One, the battery life. It’s advertised as 10 hours but I’ve needed to give it a charge once every day. Two, its very much a web-enabled device and works brilliantly as such but needs to be tweeked and fiddled with to make it useful as a standalone. It’s also not currently possible to connect a camera or external memory card to the device (although I’m sure this will become possible in time).

From first connection it is very easy to setup, and the screen is brilliantly clear. It’s also based on the android operating system so most android apps work with it, and of course it syncs brilliantly with my ‘proper’ kindle.

With the addition the a stylus pen and the full Word-like app I am able to load my novels onto it and edit them complete with track changes which is going to be a bonus. You can even install Flash Player and a neat browser called Dolphin in order to access more Flash rich web content.

So far, I’m impressed. Very impressed. Oh, and I might have become just a little bit obsessed with Angry Birds…

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #11,654 Paid in Kindle Store
#49 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Fairy Tales
#76 in Books > Fiction > Myths & Fairy Tales

Heading over to the reports I can see I’ve sold two more copies overnight, and I’m fairly sure that these are to people I don’t know.

I’m also pretty stoked by an email I had last night from a reviewer I sent my book to. I’ve not seen the review yet, but I’m told its coming soon. In the email they said that they ‘loved it. It was a fantastic read, and you’re a very wonderful writer. If you get any other books ready, send them my way, I’d love to do more reviews for you. Also if you’re interested, I’d love to do an author interview with you when you have time’. I can’t help it but be pretty high and chipper that my little story might be starting to go places.

Might…

Maybe…

Customer: Do you have Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451
Bookseller: Of course. Isn’t that the temperature at which Kindles burn?

Not actually an exchange that I overheard, or exactly a true transcript of the conversation, but an interesting expression of views.

There is nothing like a good, independent bookshop. No, there is nothing like a good bookshop, but a good independent bookshop, once found, tends to trump them all. I was in the gloriously excellent Aldeburgh Bookshop this weekend – a place where you can live, breath, and exist with books. It’s a delicious emporium of discoveries at every turn. Wonderful! The purveyors of such a wonderful establishment are not the source of the above mentioned exchange but I doubt that they have much care for eReaders either.

Personally though, I don’t think one should fear the eReader. I love my Kindle, but I also strongly, passionately, believe that it will never kill the book. No technology ever developed to date has ever successfully defeated the might of the book. That said the market for mass-market, stack’em’high printruns and ‘airport fiction’ may well disappear to be replaced by wifi download points but these other other outlets are already threatening the good Independent Bookseller.

What is certain is that the world is changing, and publishing with it. The old publishing models are in a state of flux. That’s not to say that the Davids of Indie authors will defeat the Goliaths of the publishing industry. They might and they might not, it really doesn’t matter. What ePublishing, Indie authors and self-publishng does for books is that it allows more stories to find more readers. A good independent (and indeed chain) bookseller should be embracing the eReader and all the choice that brings. The readers will respect them for it. They will come to the shop to find out what the good books are. The bookseller needs to nurture the appetite of the readers, and yes, sometimes suggesting books that get delivered wirelessly rather than in a paper bag, or self-published books where the margins are tighter because a company like Amazon are getting their cut. Give the reader what they want and they are more likely to listen to your suggestions and come back to your shop to buy those physical books that smell so good.

Coincidence being the funny thing that is, there was of course an article in The Guardian today about how to become an ebook superstar with various dos and don’ts. Thankfully I seem to be doing much of right things (or at lease not doing the don’ts!) thanks in the most part to my new twitter pal Emily Tippetts.

With only half the day gone I’d passed the 100 downloads in a single day mark, and entended my reach in the US quite considerably, climbing UP 525,395 in the rankings which places me at:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,488 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
#27 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > World Literature > Mythology
#37 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children’s eBooks > Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror > Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Magic

…in the US store placing me ahead of the Twilight Saga and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in number of downloads. Considering I’d only sold one copy in the US to date, I am pretty impressed with this and as it must have increased my visibility over there. Here’s hoping that half those readers are vociferous readers and keen reviewers! If it has then today will surely have been worth it.

To get The End Of All Worlds find it on Amazon with the below links, or search for it on your local amazon site…

( UK readers | US readers )

The story is blended with different stories, not just the adventures with the huldufolk and the very real threat of climate change but also stories of romance, and the development of Hanna’s band. One of the threads is that of Alice. She walked into this novel out of an earlier, unrelated, story. She’s brilliant. See an extract from her own diary entry – one of the unseen but parallel stories in the novel.

From Alice Cartwright’s Diary

Day 1: Reykjavik to Hólar

I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared in my life. I’ve been travelling for over 24 hours now. First I had to get the train down from Manchester to Cheltenham to meet up with Kirsten. Quick cup of tea and a Snickers and she was driving us to Heathrow to get our flight. I was petrified. It was bad enough before I did my first NT Acorn camp – that’s where me and Kirsten met – and it was a great holiday. The best.

This was different. Hardcore. This was a proper expedition. Iceland in tents, building and repairing trails. I thought drystone walling on the York moors was going to be scary.

The gang are not what I was expecting though. They are just normal. I mean there’s the usual weirdo who I’m going to have to avoid, but the rest seem nice. Kirsten and I have fallen in with a couple who seem nice. I say couple, they’re friends. He’s really fit. She’s half-Icelandic or something with family in Reykjavik. I thought we were staying in Reykjavik overnight but the leader he’s driven us from the airport and gone straight north. We’re staying our first night in an agricultural school or something – mattresses on the classroom floor with these really scary portraits that follow you round the room – very Harry Potter!

The country is so beautiful. The drive up here was amazing. I’m going to love this trip. I know I am. But bed now. I think there’s our first geothermal pool to look forward to after breakfast tomorrow…

To get The End Of All Worlds find it on Amazon with the below links, or search for it on your local amazon site…

( UK readers | US readers )

Please talk about this promotion on Facebook, and Tweet using the hashtag #TheEndOfAllWorlds…

Does it work for you?

Amazon Kindle: Thomas Shepherd shared from Twilight
kindle.amazon.com
“I decided as long as I was going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly.”

I’ve never really been that enthusiastic to read the Twilight, but it has been a phenonemal success, and I do find its presense in the bookshops intriguing. Whether or not I would ever have bought a book, and I’m only really reading it now because it amounted to about $5 as an eBook on Amazon – and mainly because I wanted to give it a proper try try out reading it on my Kindle!

20% through it, and I wouldn’t say it was terrible. It hasn’t gripped me totally yet though – I was expecting more vampires by now. I’m only sticking with it because I know there are vampires to come but there hasn’t been anything to signify much out of the ordinary yet – just a so-so written American High School drama.

As for reading it on a Kindle? …I’m loving it! It’s obviously not the same as a ‘real’ book and it can never replace a real book for me, but its very comfortable to read. It also saves your position for you when you fall asleep in front of it at night.

It’s hard not to come at this book without preconceptions. It would scarcely have been possible to have not heard of either the books or the films. I am also aware that of the polarisation in views between those who love it and its characters to the point of excess and those who deride for the way that its written. I am going to try and keep an open mind with it and see how it goes. I’ve read the first chapte though, and its, okay. The one thing that I will say is that it hasn’t gripped me yet. For something that has been likened as Harry Potter for girls, I’m not so sure. From the very start of Philosopher’s Stone I was hooked; I was in there and compelled to read it (and that with no prior infomation at all about it!).

Twilight, so far, doesn’t dump you straight into any sense of magic or mystery or idea that its going to anything other than a teen romance or American High School tale of growing up. Which maybe its not. But it does have werewolves and vampires in it, I am led to believe, and so I would have expected some sense of the unordinary in it. Still, its early days…

From and eBook point of view, it reads well, and is comfortable on the eye, unlike reading journal entries on the old laptop. I like it!