It seems easy, sometimes. I mean a swipe here and slice there and some waiting, and soon enough it’s over. That’s easy, right? Like playing a violin, really. Playing a fiddle, a fiddler’s tune and then nothing. Except when it starts to feel like nothing you start to hear music, real honest to God beautiful melodies, and by then it’s too late to share the music with anyone.
Bri asked: I like your beard.
Me too. I’m quite attached to it.
Though sometimes I wonder what my face looks like underneath it, which leads me to wonder that if I keep the beard for, let’s say, forty years, then shave it off, would I have some sort of dissociative psychological breakdown?
Bri asked: I like your beard.
Me too. I’m quite attached to it.
Though sometimes I wonder what my face looks like underneath it, which leads me to wonder that if I keep the beard for, let’s say, forty years, then shave it off, would I have some sort of dissociative psychological breakdown?
Amazon.com says in past three months, they’ve sold more e-books than hardcovers – a first.
From the New York Times:
Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, theKindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.
In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.
The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.
Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.
The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.
This is depressing. Although, it’s just hardbacks, not their entire book stock, which is what I initially thought and hence was completely shocked.
This might have depressed me as well, once, but as with all things in life I’ve come to new conclusions. I began to think about what a book meant to me, and I realized the book (the object) itself means nothing. It was the words within the book, what they said and what they meant, that matter. All those books I began collecting were merely another example of my need to collect objects, and display them, in an attempt to feel like I owned worthwhile things. As much as I enjoyed buying the books and reading them, they eventually just ended up on a shelf where they’d sit and take up space. The books became meaningless trophies.
Aside from this is the question of usability. I have never been able to read a book by scrolling in a browser because it leaves no room for pause, what with the giant wall of text facing me down. It’s quite off-putting. However, the advent of ebooks (or ebook apps for devices such as iPad) allows for digital books that are formatted like a physical book with virtual pages that can be turned at my leisure. I’ve read a few books this way now (mostly older books that are now in the public doman and free to download) and I haven’t seen a drawback outside of the need to eventually stop and charge the device.
Books are ancient. There are many that contain information and stories that might never find their way into an ebook, and for that reason alone they remain an important medium that we cannot do away with. However, it’s important to consider the cost of continuing with the practice of printing books. They use up material and resources that do not necessarily need to be spent to create books and can be saved for other uses, or perhaps spared altogether and left alone in their natural state (of course ebooks also use up resources and energy, but something tells me it’s less than the cost of printing thousands of physical books). I will continue to buy physical books when necessary and ebooks as often as I can because what matters most is the content and the information or stories that the content imparts. It is what mattered in the days of papyrus, straw, and stone; it is what matters in the age of print; and it is what will matter in the age of the digital book.
Amazon.com says in past three months, they’ve sold more e-books than hardcovers – a first.
From the New York Times:
Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, theKindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.
In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.
The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.
Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.
The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.
This is depressing. Although, it’s just hardbacks, not their entire book stock, which is what I initially thought and hence was completely shocked.
This might have depressed me as well, once, but as with all things in life I’ve come to new conclusions. I began to think about what a book meant to me, and I realized the book (the object) itself means nothing. It was the words within the book, what they said and what they meant, that matter. All those books I began collecting were merely another example of my need to collect objects, and display them, in an attempt to feel like I owned worthwhile things. As much as I enjoyed buying the books and reading them, they eventually just ended up on a shelf where they’d sit and take up space. The books became meaningless trophies.
Aside from this is the question of usability. I have never been able to read a book by scrolling in a browser because it leaves no room for pause, what with the giant wall of text facing me down. It’s quite off-putting. However, the advent of ebooks (or ebook apps for devices such as iPad) allows for digital books that are formatted like a physical book with virtual pages that can be turned at my leisure. I’ve read a few books this way now (mostly older books that are now in the public doman and free to download) and I haven’t seen a drawback outside of the need to eventually stop and charge the device.
Books are ancient. There are many that contain information and stories that might never find their way into an ebook, and for that reason alone they remain an important medium that we cannot do away with. However, it’s important to consider the cost of continuing with the practice of printing books. They use up material and resources that do not necessarily need to be spent to create books and can be saved for other uses, or perhaps spared altogether and left alone in their natural state (of course ebooks also use up resources and energy, but something tells me it’s less than the cost of printing thousands of physical books). I will continue to buy physical books when necessary and ebooks as often as I can because what matters most is the content and the information or stories that the content imparts. It is what mattered in the days of papyrus, straw, and stone; it is what matters in the age of print; and it is what will matter in the age of the digital book.
children
I never want children. I never want children because there are nearly seven billion human beings on this planet and the instinctive desire to procreate does not outweigh the notion that humanity is getting out of hand. I cannot shake the feeling that we are headed for a stone wall and doing nothing to stop, let alone slow down. I don’t want to help bring another life into this world when we do so little or nothing at all to help the ones who are given life and abandoned. We do what we can, but it will never be enough.
children
I never want children. I never want children because there are nearly seven billion human beings on this planet and the instinctive desire to procreate does not outweigh the notion that humanity is getting out of hand. I cannot shake the feeling that we are headed for a stone wall and doing nothing to stop, let alone slow down. I don’t want to help bring another life into this world when we do so little or nothing at all to help the ones who are given life and abandoned. We do what we can, but it will never be enough.
The words that never were are not easily forgotten
Self-censorship is a form of self-expression. The things we erase matter just as much as the things we write; the act of deleting matters just as much as its opposite. To choose not to speak at all is a way of expressing oneself. Whether or not this is healthy is another matter. Is it a creative act? Righteous protest? Passive aggression? An expression of one’s self, a self that—it just so happens—may not be so terribly brave after all?
— fictionalhistories
The words that never were are not easily forgotten
Self-censorship is a form of self-expression. The things we erase matter just as much as the things we write; the act of deleting matters just as much as its opposite. To choose not to speak at all is a way of expressing oneself. Whether or not this is healthy is another matter. Is it a creative act? Righteous protest? Passive aggression? An expression of one’s self, a self that—it just so happens—may not be so terribly brave after all?
— fictionalhistories
a calmness inside of me
tigersihaveknown-deactivated201 asked: I have a calmness inside of me now knowing that people out there, kind amazing wonderful people, read that entry and even gave it the time of day. For it was highly personable and one of the closest things relating to my own life, actually, maybe the only one that is all real? I just want to thank you for just reading, for appreciating my feelings and not finding them immature or something to be set aside. Thank you. XXangela
I visited the zoo several months ago after a few decades since the last visit and it was an overwhelmingly depressing experience. It was a theme park of depression, in fact, and the artificiality of the lives in those enclosures just weighed me down for weeks. It was different from my experiences on farms where the animals seemed more animated, more willing to live, than the ones at the zoo. They rushed for food, galloped across fields, and made all kinds of sounds. The animals at the zoo just meandered along from one corner to another (although one especially angry gorilla hurled mud with great fury), and they didn’t seem very interested in anything. It had me thinking about the differences between those environments and that’s when I realized that those farm animals, the ones seemingly so full of vigor? They were used to that life, and they knew what to expect in their domesticated paradise. The food and the galloping, it was all they knew. But those zoo animals, they weren’t used to the life. They had known freedom, unhindered and savage, at the mercy of their own instinct and will to survive. The cages that held them were boundaries that were as foreign to them as the the wilds of the world would be foreign to the farm animals. Given a choice one can only conclude that the zoo animals, the ones whose instinct and blood memory still linked them to the wild places, would choose to return to those environments, and the farm animals, whose lives revolved around the familiarity and comfort of domestication, would remain there.
And all of this, these thoughts and ponderings, they faded away. They were filed in the archive and forgotten so that I could carry on, doing what I do for my daily bread, and living what I am satisfied to call an existence but not quite certain I would call a life. I’d all but forgotten that I could think of such things until I was reminded that we are all of us capable of every thought, but only through inspiration and the relation of human experience can we be certain that it is okay to do so.