Nothing Gold Can Stay

I love printed books. They will always have certain advantages over ebooks. For one, you can read them without electricity or batteries. For another, when you buy a physical book, it's yours. You walk out of the store and go home with it and keep it for as long as you want.

To the surprise of some, that's not the case with ebooks. Major vendors control whether and how long you can read ebooks you've "bought". (They now say "rented" is a better description of downloaded books.)

Still reading more paper books than ebooks, I hadn't come to think of purchased ebooks as permanently mine. As a poetry editor, I have to be up on how ebooks are read and created because I want the e-reading public to read poetry. That said, my ebook pricing reflects that ebooks aren't solid like books, in the same way MP3s aren't solid like CDs. If I can't hold them in my hand, I expect to pay less for them.

The ebooks I publish will always cost less than print would, reflecting that no money was spent on paper, ink, and binding. My ebooks will never be free because I believe creative and clerical work have value; but, if and when Amazon or BN decides to pull back your purchases, you're only out the cost of a movie rental.

WRECK-IT RALPH

My brother and I are Wreck-It Ralph's target audience, having spent many a childhood afternoon in mall arcades. We took a couple of hours off last week to watch a matinee.

Impressively, none of the main characters is stereotypical. After thirty years, Ralph (John C. Reilly) doesn't want to be a bad guy anymore, but Fix-It Felix Jr. (Jack McBrayer), Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), and Calhoun (Jane Lynch) also showed capacity to stretch beyond their "day jobs".

Wreck-It Ralph isn't perfectly paced, but I appreciated the characters and plot more as the movie went on, and by the end I was hanging on every word. Definitely worth your quarters.

I Have the Power!

I'm back to spontaneous blogging and regular computer use, having received and installed my replacement power supply battery today. I think I'll go for a walk.

Waiting for BackUPS

We had a three-minute power outage around ten A.M. yesterday. I was watching the French Open final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, but my computer was on as usual and went down right away, the battery in my uninterruptible power supply having served three and a half years.

As I wait for a new battery this week, I'll be offline several hours a day to limit the time I could be hit by power surges. I do have THE LOST ONES, Ace Atkins' sequel to THE RANGER, to finish reading. Also arriving are COVERT AFFAIRS Season 2 and WHITE COLLAR Season 3 on DVD.

Not My Type

Members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society are sharing typewriter memories. I was neither very fast nor proficient with a typewriter, and was always conscious of how much paper I wasted. Luckily, by the time I had to type term papers, several relatives were on their way to becoming programmers, and I had access to computers and printers.

Working on a magazine in college, I had basic knowledge of MS Word and ClarisWorks, but always preferred WordPerfect.

I've been a Linux/OpenOffice user since 2004. I bought my current computer new for $800 in 2006 and in six years of system updates, it has never slowed down like my two previous Windows machines.

All this said, I brainstorm with a pen and memo pad, which might be conspicuous in public if people ever looked up from their laptops and smartphones.