Kindles

I was beginning to come round to the concept of the Kindle.  I was really warming to it.

As a writer’s daughter, naturally I love the smell of paper, the feel of it, the sight of books on my shelves, the comfort of curling up at night with a reassuring weight of text and a sexy cover by my bedside.  I love books not merely for their content, but for what they stand for – learning, stories, adventure, exploration, a sum of knowledge – and in this sense I suppose my attachment to traditional ink and paper could have been seen as sentimental, more than practical.  I love my local library, too – not least because it’s free and I am now second in the local authority queue for the new Terry Pratchett book.  (Can’t wait!)

I’m also, like most of publishing, not yet quite sure what the e-book revolution is going to do for the written word as a whole.  Readers of this blog will already be aware of my, and most other writers main concern – in a market where suddenly everyone can self-publish to iTunes, how are professional writers going to earn their living?  I am all in favour of many people writing, but from my biased place in life I do genuinely believe that the publishing process serves both the author, by feeding them, and the reader, by essentially acting as a quality control barrier.  It’s not always right, it’s not always just, it’s not always even much of a quality control system, but it’s something – however, this is a different rant, and a different debate.

However, all this said, I was genuinely beginning to warm to the kindle.  It’s lightness, it’s size, it’s ease of reading, it’s potential to carry vast numbers of works and save on luggage space, it’s slow shuffle towards affordability, it’s environmentalism, the ease of purchase… there were all sorts of things beginning to beguile me.

And then I learnt the horrible, profound, shocking truth: the kindle can’t do columns.

It may not sound like much of a complaint, but when one of your novels features a whole chapter where…

… and it’s really quite good…

… and absolutely needs columns…

… and the kindle can’t support the format and your publisher can only do one proof so every single damn format of the book has to change…

… and suddenly this really quite good section with columns in it is a rather less good section where the formatting is all over the place…

… because of the kindle…

Suddenly rage becomes the order of the day.  The Wittenberg press could do columns; Windows 3.1 could do columns, hell, even a manual typewriter that you have to hit with the strength of a Titan can do bloody columns, but the kindle?  Oh no.  It can’t even do eccentric formatting to create the illusion of columns.  I am a writer who likes to play with the toys technology has given me, and with indeed the usual laws of voice and structure that literature presents, but for a single bit of should-be revolutionary technology, I find myself shot in the foot, screwed over by a machine that should be the herald of tomorrow and is, in fact, a source of unbelievable rage and frustration for me.

It may sound like a petty rage now…

… but just you wait until you read the book….