Kindle Reading; Holiday Books

I've just finished reading/listening to my 51st book on my Kindle, and have started on #52, a space opera by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I first held my Kindle in my hands on February 27, 2009, so I've had about two years. I currently have 34 books loaded on it, and about 75 more kindlized works stored on my computer to be loaded as needed. Among the books already loaded: some of the Dray Prescot works that were never "printed" in English, a couple of the "Shadow" pulp novels, several SF novels from the 40s and 50s, some books by friends like M. F. Korn and Ty Johnston, collections like Discount Noir, and such classics as The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ben Hur, and War and Peace.

I bought a fair amount of my kindle books from Amazon, but over two-thirds of the books I have and have read I downloaded free from Project Gutenberg and other online ebook sites. Many of these I downloaded as text files and then kindlized them, which is ridiculously easy. I just send a text file to my kindle email account and they kindlize it within seconds and either send it back to my kindle or to my PC so I can load it later at my leisure. I have found that I can improve my listening experience on Kindle with such books if I do a little editing on the text file first to make sure there are periods after chapter titles and so on.

Although the reading experience itself on Kindle is very good because of the lack of glare and the ability to increase font size, I've found the text to speech function to be one of my favorite applications. I let my Kindle read to me as I take my long daily commute, and although the voice is definitely mechanical sounding and lacks the voice qualities of a good audio book, I find that it doesn't matter much with a lot of books, such as the Shadow and Doc Savage Pulp stories. I tend to supply the intonations in my head as I listen along.

The Kindle has not meant an end to my long love affair with printed books. In fact, I've bought more "new" books in the past three years than at any time in my life. I've also bought printed copies of some of the books I've read on the Kindle just to have them on my shelves. It has complimented my love affair with reading, not complicated it.

And I'll end this little ode to the Kindle by mentioning a couple of my own works that can be found on Amazon for the Kindle. I’m talking about Killing Trail, and Chimes, of course. “Chimes” is actually a longish short story while “Killing Trail” is a collection of my western stories. They’re both pretty cheap, and I feel comfortable recommending the author to you. :)

Btw, Killing Trail is also available on Smashwords in different ebook formats and PDF if you should perchance prefer.




However, if you prefer to do your holiday shopping for printed books, check out Erin Cole’s Holiday Catalog, which includes Cold in the Light by yours truly, as well as many other wonderful books from up and coming writers who deserve your consideration.

Happy holidays!