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Check Out These Kindle Deals!

 

Two great anthologies are on sale right now for $1.99 over at Amazon.com:

 
 

Lovecraft’s Monsters edited by Ellen Datlow, with stories by Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Caitlin Kiernan, and more

and

 

The End of the World: Stories of the Apocalypse collects classic stories of the apocalypse from as far back as the 1940s, and includes stories from Lester del Rey, Arthur C. Clarke, Orson Scott Card, George R.R. Martin, Norman Spinrad, Nancy Kress, and others. Also, it contains one of my favorite short stories by Neil Gaiman, “We Can Get Them For You Wholesale”.

 

I don’t think you can go wrong with either of these.

 
 

If you want a trio of story collections about the end of everything, you might also check out the recently released Expiration Date, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick. Enjoy your apocalypse!

‘My Monster Burrufu’ Free on Kindle Through Friday

My Monster Burrufu by Alberto Corral is free on Kindle through Friday, April 18. This is a cute little chapter book for ages 9-12 produced by a small press, Petite Grande Idee. It’s about a lonely little girl who makes friends with a monster living in the walls of her house. It’s not horror, but it is a fun story that can be enjoyed by both girls and boys. We reviewed My Monster Burrufu when it came out– you can check out the review here.

I know I’ll be looking it up!

 

 

Is This Really A “Dramatic Advantage” For Ebooks?

I’ve seen this a couple of places now, and I just don’t understand it. First, Alan Jacobs wrote about how easy note taking is with his e-reader in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and now an article by educational technology and literacy expert Jamie McKenzie is suggesting that ebooks enhance the reading experience by a.) making note taking easier and b.) using the web to explore topics that intrigue the reader in the midst of the reading experience.

First, I just don’t find it as easy to keyboard notes into the text with a touchscreen or highlight with my finger as I do to write or highlight by hand. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but hunting and pecking on my smartphone or ereader is frustrating and distracting and I’ve been known to just skip over taking notes or writing down questions while reading ebooks. Highlighting is equally frustrating for me- it could be a lack of coordination but I never seem to be able to highlight exactly what I want- I get extra lines, or miss words. It’s a complete disruption for me. I don’t think it’s just because I’m a digital immigrant- I asked a recent college graduate about this, and she had the same issues. If this is frustrating for me, an adult, then what would it be like for kids? As for browsing through the Web to explore words and ideas that I encounter when I’m reading, that doesn’t mean to me that it’s so much an interactive experience or an “advantage” as it is a distraction from the narrative. I think it’s great to have that as a resource at hand if necessary, but to browse further and further away from the book without actually interacting with the text you access doesn’t seem like an advantage… it seems like a reason you might never actually finish the book. Because, as Alan Jacobs notes, we do live in an age of distraction, which can make deep reading difficult indeed.

Jacobs’ argument for the advantage of ebooks over print is, in fact, that ebooks (or at least Kindle books) enable concentrated reading because features like Web browsing are difficult to access, and (at least in Kindle books) the lack of page numbers means readers are less likely to flip back and forth. I tend to agree with this so far. I haven’t been tempted to leave the text to browse the web (but this could have to do with both the kind of reader I am and the kind of ebooks I read) and the location numbers that the Kindle uses make it very difficult to go back. I find the second more annoying than advantageous because I read very quickly and one of the disadvantages of reading quickly is that I end up skipping over sections of text that I need to understand the story going forward. But the lack of page numbers does mean that you keep going forward, and since you aren’t cued by the physical length of the book as to how much more there is to read, you are more likely to keep going. When you’re in the flow, which happens easily when there are no defined physical limits, it’s hard to stop. If you love being swept up in the story, that’s a definite advantage. Unless you’re like me, and reading is like an addiction, where setting limits is REALLY important (especially when you’re reading, say, Outlander).

Speaking of Outlander, there is, I think, one advantage that I have discovered ebooks have over physical books, and that’s flexibility. In reading Jacobs’ book, I was convinced to turn back and look at some of the “classics” that I hadn’t touched since high school. It was a lot more comfortable to reread Oliver Twist on my smartphone than it would have been to carry a clunky physical copy around- Dickens was paid by the word, and his books aren’t short (and neither is Outlander– you could break your wrists carrying around the physical copy). It’s also probably unlikely that I would have sought out a physical copy of The Canterville Ghost after seeing the movie (with Patrick Stewart as the ghost) as it’s a very short work. But it certainly is well worth a read!

Well, now I’m rambling a bit, so to return to my original point- is it really a “dramatic advantage”, as McKenzie describes it, to be able to wander away from the book in midstream, even to explore the events and ideas you encounter? In my personal experience, no. Is note taking and highlighting easier and more organized? Well, my experience is that it’s not easy enough for me to discover whether it’s a better way to organize my thoughts. Do ebooks, as Jacobs suggests, enable more concentrated reading at a time when that’s becoming more difficult? I think they can, and that’s an overall advantage for readers. Can ebooks encourage us to try new genres, different lengths of texts, or more challenging works? I think so, if we consciously attend to what and how we read.

But when it comes to really paying attention to what’s between the covers, I’ll take the physical book, pen and highlighter in hand, thank you very much.