E-reader ramblings, now that I've had some time with mine.

38 degrees today, bitter cold and beautiful. 28 all night.

I've had sometime with my e-reader, now; I've read a few books and some of the longer Yuletide fics. My sister is the sort of person with a Kindle app on her phone, because using a traditional screen as an e-reader is no big deal when you read occasionally; since about the start of the new year I've been doing almost nothing but reading, and my eyes love the e-ink displays. It's exactly what I need the technology to be: as easy to read as the printed page.

Physically interacting with it has taken some adjustment: It's so small (in both width and diameter) that it's hard for me to hold without some sort of hand cramp, so I've had to learn to prop it, not hold it. The touch screen isn't horribly responsive—it's functional, but on occasion I have to touch it three times to turn a page: not awesome for my wrists. Occasionally the sleep/power button also feels non-responsive. I can feel the limitations to the technology, in short: plastic case, less than perfect touch screen, I can see where it cuts corners.

Getting books on it is a learning curve and an eye-opener. On one hand, all of Gutenberg and other public domain/creative commons books are suddenly open to me; on the other, it all feels so ... ad hoc. Formatting and proofreading is a gamble, libraries have far too few e-book licences and waitlists times are horrendous, the Kobo software doesn't support third party materials of any sort. There's always this sense, these days, of living in the future—but at the same time we're still catching up with ourselves, and we don't know how to manage this wonderful technology we've created. E-book license? people read ... book? many book? get book on e-reader? money? HOW? It's what makes the Kindle and Amazon's monopoly so successful—that it's streamlined, I mean, while everyone else uses Adobe Digital Editions and, at least for the free books, downloads a few different copies from around the web until they find a epub with few typos and something remotely resembling formatting.

(Lyz, I now have all the sympathy and understanding.)

For those curious, non-Gutenberg/public domain books on my e-reader:
Creative Commons books from Small Beer Press (especially the Kelly Link)
Some books by Cory Doctorow
A few of books from the Nightshade apocalypse averted giveaway
and a few others which are more of a gamble so I'll report back on them at an indeterminate future date.

And if you see some sort of gaping hole on this list that wants to be filled with a quality free e-book, do let me know.

Goodness knows I'm one of the foremost proponents of books as texture/experience/physical object/fill a bathtub with them and jump in, but I like my little e-reader and it opens a door to me: to public domain classics I could track down elsewhere but here can find immediately, for free; to e-book giveaways or review copies; to even more obscure library loans which, when I finally can check them out, I can check out from home. And separating the reading experience from my computer screen not only saves me eyestrain, it also puts reading back in the realm of curled-on-bed-under-blankets-cuddling-pillow capital-E Experience. I use the library extensively, and the experience of a borrowed book is also different: more communal and a little quirky, someone else's typo corrections and turned-down corners, a hundred accumulated scents for Odi to sniff; it's a totally different experience from the ones I have with books in my own library, but not a worse one. This, likewise.

This thing where Dreamwidth posts entries if I hit enter while adding tags is UNWELCOME.

Book Review: The Dancers of Arun by Elizabeth A. Lynn

Title: The Dancers of Arun (The Chronicles of Tornor Book 2)
Author: Elizabeth A. Lynn
Published: New York: Ace Trade, 2000 (1979)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 245
Total Page Count: 125,603
Text Number: 363
Read Because: recommended by century_eyes, borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Crippled as a child, Kerris lives in Tornor Keep and trains as a scribe. But he's long had an unusual psychic link to his older brother Kel—and one day Kel comes to him and offers to take him away with his chearis, a group of dancing warriors. The Dancers of Arun is a distant, indirect sequel to Watchtower, and each book stands alone; it's similar to its predecessor in all the best ways, and improves on some of that book's flaws. Characters and their relationships star, with plot serving only as a vehicle towards character growth (the plot here is both more local and unique than in Watchtower). Kerris is a superb protagonist, a convincing young adult—immature but not petty, with distinct potential for growth—whose disability is important but not exploited. Unusual, intriguing, and beautifully rendered relationships abound: Lynn violates almost every heteronormative expectation without fetishizing the violations, and the emotional landscape that grows around Kerris is varied and vibrant, ranging from friendship to romance, from a chosen family of intimate friends to joyful polyamory; there's enough situational difficulty and character depth that it doesn't read as a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Lynn's prose remains somewhat stilted, and while functional the plot is far from memorable. But this is what my id is full of—troubled characters, complex emotions, unusual and lovely interactions—and so I find it hard to view The Dancers of Arun objectively and I certainly don't mind its flaws. I recommend it enthusiastically to any reader that shares a similar interest in character and relationship.

Review posted here on Amazon.com.

(phoenixfalls you should totally still read Watchtower if/when you get around to it—but this book? read it someday? soon? please yes good do it do it DO IT. Seriously though, this is a lot of the tropes we've been talking about, packed densely into one beautiful place. Also: polyamory.)