I have 1700 Kindle books. They are not all on any one device but they are all in my archive of ebooks. When I got my first Kindle in 2008, we had 978 printed books. Our office shelves were bulging and we had stacks of books sitting around. It was the crowded situation that made us get rid of about 700 books, all paper, then, of course.
A brief conversation with a very intelligent and articulate friend the other day made it clear to me that many of my friends would do themselves good by writing more. I would like to be able to read more of their thoughts, ideas and adventures so more writing by them would do me good, too. So, I wrote the blog post "Write!" a couple of days ago. As usual, to write about writing, or anything else, I start by reviewing: what have I done, what have I read, what do I know?
When it comes to writing as such, I think of
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg,
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron,
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and
Style: An Anti-textbook by Richard Lanham
My feelings, without checking or looking, are that the Lanham book is maybe the most energetic and spicy. I wanted to be able to look at the book. As a Kindle user cum enthusiasm, I look for the book in Kindle form. Couldn't find it. Looked for the book in print. It was written in 1974 but I saw on the Amazon site that it was reprinted by Paul Dry Books in 2007.
I went to the Paul Dry website, looking for ebook information. Picked a book they were emphasizing and checked the Amazon site. I think that book publishers these days, especially after "50 Shades of Grey", don't want to publish books without also putting them out in Kindle form. There were Paul Dry titles in Kindle form. I emailed Mr. Dry and his editor asking for Style: An Anti-textbook to be released in Kindle. That same day, the publisher emailed me a link to the book on Amazon's site in Kindle. Wow! Don't know why it didn't' come up but that sort of thing has happened before.
Clicked on the link given and voilà! There it was! But across the top of the page was a banner reading "Our records show that you purchased this book in 2012". Had the durned thing all along! Didn't remember getting it and didn't think to check whether it was among the 1700 books already in my Kindle archives! You can see that when Amazon says: "Purchase once, read anywhere", they mean it.
Let this be a lesson: buy Kindle books when available for economy and ease of use and storage AND check your archives for books of interest. You might have the items already!
P.S. There are at least three major companies for ebooks: Amazon, Play Books (Google), Nook (Barnes and Noble) All three have apps that you can place on an iPad. Then, your iPad is a reader for all three.
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