it's been months, so let us talk about books and records

Damn, I find that I have about 6 drafts in my Blogger file which I have never gotten around to posting. The problem here is that most of those posts are like newspapers. More than a couple days old and they're not good for much more than wrapping fish...except that blog posts don't even have that last little bit of utility. So, with a certain amount of regret, I checked off most of 'em and hit the "delete" button."

I am making this a mission...instead of giving up something this Lent, I am doing something intentional and positive: I am going to write 20 minutes a day. I am going to write 20 minutes a day and post it here. I am already 12 days behind, but that is because I really didn't decide to make this my Lenten discipline until today. OK, better late then never, eh?

Now, having gotten that off my plate, I have a request for any and all who happen upon this note. In the future, whenever you feel the need to buy a book, first go to Amazon and check to see if there is a Kindle version. If there is, no other action is required. However, if there is not a Kindle edition, please click on the link that requests a Kindle version. The more clicks Amazon gets, the more pressure publishers will feel to put out digital versions. I ask this because I am finding that I like reading the digital versions better than I like reading them in their traditional printed-on-a-paper-page format. I truly believe that books in digital format will be the next form of mass-market distribution.

Mass market paperbacks were once seen as anathema to "legitimate" publishing. Paperbacks were the province of genre hacks. They were good for potboiler science fiction, murder mysteries and romance novels. Serious authors of serious books didn't publish in paperback format. At least not until publishers saw how well paperbacks sold and finally figured out that paperbacks made them more money in the end. Well, I think that digital format books will do the same. All it will take is for the publishers to devise a form of digital security that makes it about as hard to steal content as it is now to scan and then digitize the pages of a book. It simply takes too much effort to scan and then digitize a book to make it seem attractive to jerks who get their kicks that way.

Look, the same thing is beginning to happen in the world of mp3 music files. I was a big Napster user when it first came out. When it was origninally shut down, I puttered around out in Gnutella space, mostly on Limewire, but it wasn't the same. On Limewire, I mostly downloaded mp3 versions of music I already owned on old vinyl records. I don't have an iPod, so I don't use iTunes, but I do use Amazon. For $0.99 per track I can buy individual tracks which I like without having to buy a whole cd. So now I budget myself for about $5.00 per week for new music. I get to pick and choose; I am assuming that the creative artist gets some of this--that the parasitic leeches in suits don't usurp all my money--which makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing. And, $5.00 a week is not an exorbitant amount to pay for music I like. Also, I support a listener sponsored online radio station (RadioParadise.com) which also means I send something on to the creative people who create my music. I still go down to the boxes holding all my old records every now and then to see if there is anything that rings a bell...that I would like in digital format. If there is, and I have it on vinyl, then I'll go out to Limewire to see if somebody has a digital copy. I would make my own except I don't have a turntable anymore. And, besides, its too much work.

I would actually really like to be able to buy tracks directly from the artist, bypassing the suits who suck off the talents of the truly creative completely. I would think that 50-cents a track would be a sufficient price which would probably give the artist 3 or 4 times as much income as they get from the record industry which exists only to exploit their talent. Today musicians don't need the hugely expensive recording studios of old. Some cheap foam soundproofing, a PC, a couple microphones and one of the music-studio software packages and a garage band can put together tracks that are as good as those coming out of most record label studios--at least in digital quality. Now, a good sound engineer and a good producer can make a huge difference, but they are not completely necessary. Besides, let's face it, most producers aren't all that good.

What I'm getting at is that it is cost-effective for me to pay for individual tracks, because, again let's face it, on most albums/cds there are only a couple tracks, at best, that I really like. The others, for the most part, are just fillers. In fact, I can only think of a couple albums/cds that had more than a couple songs, and those were either "greatest hits" or concept albums like "Tommy".

*sigh* I have digressed. My point was that when digital books can be had for a couple bucks apiece, there is no real incentive to copy them illegally or to seek copies of books that were made illegally. There are a lot of books which are free for the taking out there because they are in the public domain. A person could build a huge digital library for relative little cash outlay. Sure, there will always be a market for physical books. There are probably as many good reasons for physical books as there are readers. However, like the paperback, digital publishing is a new technology whose time has come...or, at least, is about to take off. There are some books I want in physical form, but there are even more which I would be just as happy owning as electronic ones and zeros. So, urge publishers to make digital copies available. And, if they could make them available in an open source format so they could be read on any one oa the e-readers out there, that would be better yet.

I have made up about 4 days of my Lenten discipline with this post. More tomorrow.