I have always liked books for being books. Their weight, size, shape, smell, feel, their newness or oldness combine an aesthetic of limitless promise and reward. Then there's the covers, from pulp paperback flash to tooled leather classics, from crisp and sharp to frayed and tatty, I have much-loved examples of most types on my shelves. All that pleasure, before reading a word.
As much as I love them, the thought of an eReader capable of storing their entire contents has troubled me. It's a thought I tried to ignore but found I couldn't, at least, not if I wanted to be read - we can all publish now, if we have access to a computer and the web.
I haven't abandoned the vainglorious hope of holding a printed work of mine in my hands but I would see it as more of an industry accolade than the sign of certain success I once imagined it to be; when it comes down to essentials, it's words.So when I decided to go this route and got an e-bayed eReader to see what I would be dealing with, my family were astonished by my heresy. My little Sony has its own aesthetic appeal and although I have had to step away from a known world to appreciate it, the technology it's a part of is empowering.
I am averse to the 'monetising' Google keeps prompting me about but happy to recommend things that do what they do well. Sony's Reader Library software is one of those. If you're the kind of person who can happily read from a computer screen, it'll do it for your epub books as well as managing them pretty well. I can't speak for Kindle other than that I have formatted my stories for Kindle too; I thought about getting one but found Amazon's proprietary stance distasteful in the extreme. Of course a pdf is pretty much the simplest and most trouble-free way of reading my work and that format is available too. I hope I've covered the bases.
There's a reasonable chance that you too, are a writer. After much bamboozled web searching, it turned out that the writing software I needed to both write and format was simply an upgrade to my version of Scrivener. If you write and you are a Mac user, I can't recommend it highly enough.
