Why I Bought A Sony Reader

Every time I finish a book and send it off to the editor, I like to get myself something. A present to myself, for all the hard work I've done over the past year. So at the start of this month I finally put my money where my mouth is and bought an e-ink reader, specifically a Sony PRS-500 e-reader with e-ink display.

The Sony PRs-500 is the successor to the Sony Librie, which was available only in Japan and wiped every book put into it after it had been there for sixty days, in a breathtaking display of corporate stupidity. The PRS 500 does nothing of the sort, fortunately.

Since the 500 came out, the 505 has been introduced; and at the time of writing, is now available for pre-order in the UK. Apparently it's a step up from the 500, but there's a mental limit in my head beyond which I just can't yet bring myself to spend when it comes to purchasing an ebook reader, no matter how shiny and gadgety. So I picked up the older model - the 500 - from an online seller for considerably less than it would cost me to purchase the 505 (it'll go for about £200).

There has been yet more talk recently on the impact of ebooks online, particularly in terms of Tor's promotional release of a couple of dozen of their books as free ebooks, including several titles which are already quite well known and successful. Esquire magazine is putting an e-ink display powered by a 90-day battery on a hundred thousand copies of one of its upcoming issues. The leading ebook devices were recently rated on The Gadget Show, and the internet is full of haters and lovers talking about the technology. Either it's a sign of the end, or the best thing that ever happened to writers - or, more usually, something in between.

I had to get one of these things, partly to satisfy my curiousity, partly because it feels like a prop out of the tv shows I watched when I was a kid, and partly - and most justifiably - because I'm in the Far East until next year, and any physical, ink-and-paper books I buy here I'm going to have to mail back home or lug on the plane. Not only that, I can store hundreds - potentially thousands - of ebooks on my Sony Reader. Any books I've purchased can be easily re-downloaded from whichever site I bought it from if I ever lose or irreparably damage the device.

Since I got it, it's rarely been away from my hands. It's easy to read - in fact, it's easier to read in sunlight or bright light than any computer screen. It looks like actual printed letters - until you hit the next page button and, boom, it blanks out and refreshes with new text.

It is, as they say, as light as a paperback, but thinner. The fake leather jacket it comes with probably weighs as much as the reader itself. The quality of the appearance of the text is really quite startling. The screen is at times slightly reflective - something I understand has been improved on in later ebook readers.

It lacks, of course, the physical tactility of paper, yet the eye is very much fooled into believing it's looking at letters printed onto something very paper-like - with the caveat that the 'paper' is light grey in colour.

What really needs to be addressed about ebook readers in contrast to their printed cousins has more to do with habit and tactility than anything else.

I have, like many people reading this blog, a certain emotional investment in the owning of and display of paper books. When we (people like you and me) finish reading a book, we don't stick it in a box in a cupboard - we put them on display, on shelves. We like to be seen to be readers, to have the breadth of our reading and our tastes on full display. We covet books as physical artefacts. Or at least those of who are voracious readers do - by which I mean, say, anyone who owns more than a hundred books (almost eight hundred in my case, although it would be considerably more if the titles I know I won't miss or didn't particularly like in the first place weren't constantly winnowed out and given to friends).

There is, indeed, a smell and tactility to real books that e-readers cannot match.

And yet, and yet ...

When I first moved out of home and into a flat with friends lo, so many years ago, there were two things that caused me the greatest difficulty when it came to the physical process of moving. A collection of nearly a thousand vinyl lp's, and almost as many books, went with me. They had to be stored, they had to be visible, and I sure as hell wasn't going to leave them behind. They felt like they were part of me. And yet every time I wanted to move to a different flat - and I moved around quite a lot over the next several years - I had to drag this vast tonnage of plastic and paper with me every single time.

I knew people who had much less 'stuff' than me. If they wanted to move flat, they could get everything they owned into a backpack and off they went. I envied them, but I couldn't bring myself to ever contemplate losing my books and albums. It simply wasn't an idea I was prepared ever to entertain.

And yet I now have almost my entire vinyl collection in mp3 format, crammed onto a device about the same size as a packet of cigarettes. The vinyl has indeed been consigned to a cupboard in a flat back in Glasgow, a long way from Taipei. I don't miss them nearly as much, perhaps because I no longer assign them the same value as I do my books.

And not just books: almost a hundred issues of Interzone. Maybe a hundred more of more of obscure publications like SF Eye, New Pathways, and many more that seem indelibly linked into my experience of being of a certain mind and in a certain time and place. Stuff that all led and fed into the process of my becoming a professional writer. Indispensable, in other words; but far from practical when when it comes to having room for them.

It is now feasible for me to store my entire book collection on a device that is the reading equivalent of an MP3 player. On one hand, this creates a sense of freedom; I don't have to carry them all around with me if i don't want to, or as I travel around the globe. On the other hand, I still very much value my dead tree books, and have a sufficient emotional tie to them I wouldn't want to give them up. In fact, I still very much want to continue buying actual books - perhaps the ultimate indicator of how caught in the middle I am, I want at this moment to own both the electronic and paper versions of each book I buy.

I still can't quite get my head around the notion of reading a book and not being able to put it on my bookshelf.

(A brief aside: I could spend some time going into the negatives of the ebook readers. My purchase of the Sony was carefully considered, but done in the full knowledge of the many, many things that are still broken in the ebook market, something Charlie Stross has discussed at length in his blog. But there are always ways to circumvent the ridiculous limitations placed on such devices by their manufacturers, and I've been more than happy to apply those hacks when and where possible in order to be able to purchase and read the books I want to purchase and read. There are still plenty of good reasons for people to want to hold off buying an ebook reader just yet; but these reasons are almost entirely the fault of the manufacturers and their lawyers, rather than of the technology itself.)

After spending some time thinking about it, I realised that for many people, the medium - the physical book - is indistinguishable from the message contained therein: the text. They are one and the same. Yet at the same time, I know this is partly out of habit. I grew up with books this way, so my habits and inclinations are very much fixed this way.

But even so, there's a clear element of snobbishness in criticisms of e-ink readers in the press. There have been too many condemnatory articles in papers such as The Guardian where authors or critics will, in the process of rhapsodising about their collection of hardbacks and the many crammed shelves of their houses, reveal themselves to be precisely the kind of person who covets books not merely for their content, but for what possession of them says (whether consciously or otherwise) about their own perceptions of who they are and what social stratum they occupy.

To dismiss ebook readers out of hand while being photographed in some well-appointed study filled to the brim with books is to identify one as distinctly middle-class, with middle-class aspirations. They are invariably people who have a small portable television wedged into one tight corner of their living room for fear they might be seen as having 'populist' tastes, and if they have a computer, it's similarly a small, cheap laptop kept well out of sight.

This kind of attitude makes me feel much more positively towards my e-reader. Yes I had qualms, but now I have one I can't imagine not having one. I live in terror of being caught waiting for a train or bus without having it to hand. I'm reading much, much more than I have for a long time, simply because of the convenience of the device.

Another reason so many of the arguments put forth by naysayers irritate the hell out of me is they appear blinkered to one of the primary benefits of e-readers - the potential democratisation of reading, in the same way knowledge has become easily available over the internet. Yes, the devices are expensive, but although I don't think they'll become as cheap as a paperback for a long, long time, they nonetheless offer an immediate, easy-on-the-eye reading experience that can be used anywhere in the world that has computer access. That, in turn, means access to tens of thousands of out of copyright but still enormously influential novels and texts as well as more current works that can be bought and read without needing to rely on the presence of a well-stocked bookshop with plenty of titles in English And believe me, here in Taipei, I can tell you for a fact that from over here the English-speaking world looks very small and very far away.

I find myself irritated by the sniffiness of certain critics who can afford the luxury of sufficient living space they can afford to decorate their walls with thousands of books. I hope the e-reader gets into the hands of all the people who love reading but simply don't have the room for all the books they want, who, like me, don't have the luxury of a well-appointed library in their tiny flats.

To be fair, there are many other issues to be considered when it comes to the potential of ebook technology, not least the issue of how it will affect the careers and incomes of writers. I recently signed a contract allowing Pan to sell my books in e-format myself. I don't think the paper book will die. The e-ink technology will very likely be subsumed into more general-purpose devices, but there will - I believe and hope - be a continuing demand for dedicated reading devices that mimic the look and feel of a book while being able to store tens of millions of words of text. If you like reading - if you really like reading - it might be that you can't afford to not have an e-reader over the next couple of years.

Reviews

There's another good review of Stealing Light at King of the Nerds, although some caveats are made; I read these with interest (as I read all comments of my stuff with interest, as part of the constant feedback loop which exists between readers and writers. Yes, I do pay attention to what people say, and yes, sometimes it has an influence on what I write. I'm sure I'm not alone in that).

Nova Light (formerly Stealing Fire) is away in the email and I'm probably going to have to wait at least a couple of weeks to find out the reaction from the publishers. In the meantime, I'm relaxing a little bit, ie: spending too much time online and doing some tidying up the rest of the time. I'll also be working on ideas for the (as yet untitled) third Dakota Merrick book, to be started on soon-ish.

Good News From Outer Space

Just got word from Pan via my agent that the first paperback run of Stealing Light is about to sell out after less than a month on sale, and as a result a reprint has already been ordered. Nice.

progress, editing, new book title

One week to go before the new book has to be emailed to the publishers, and I've been at it pretty much ten or twelve hours a day. Yeah, yeah. Poor me. I get it. I anticipate lots of vacant staring interspersed with bouts of furious typing between now and next Wednesday when it gets fired off to Tor.

The paperback of Stealing Light has been out a couple of weeks now, and seems to be selling well, and certainly scoring higher than the previous two. Last time I looked, it was at number two on Waterstone's sf and fantasy bestseller lists, right behind Terry Pratchett. It's been floating pretty high on Amazon as well.

I got bored with the title 'Stealing Fire'. Sounds too much like some crappy action movie, possibly starring Steven Seagal. Even if the new book does indeed contain much, yes, much running around, shooting and blowing things up. Therefore I rename this book 'Nova Light', which not only sounds better, it also continues that whole thematicy-namey-thingy I was aiming for.

So. 'Nova Light'. Sounds about right.

Now I just have to figure out what the hell to call the third book when it's done.

Wordle

I read about a piece of online software called Wordle on Justine Larbalestier's blog; it takes a piece of text - even a whole book - and turns it into a picture of the most common words based on frequency. In terms of what's important in the plot of the new book - that being the text I fed in - it's actually pretty accurate. 'Remembrance' and 'Honeydew', by the way, are the names of two characters.

Lichtkrieg

Erscheinungstermin: April 2009, as they say in Germany.

I do like this cover for the German publication of Stealing Light, and I'll really have to drop a line to Random House/Heyne and ask them very nicely if I can have a larger jpg of this illustration. This came from randomhouse.de's own page for the book, and the title sounds like something you'd shout as a warning to someone in dire and immediate danger. As in, "Run, run! Lichtkrieg!" And I especially like that hint of sunlight creeping stealthily around the side of a doomed planet ...

One week in & Lewis Shiner

Stealing Light seems to be doing well since it came out in paperback; it's definitely floating a bit higher on Amazon than the previous books were, which bodes well. Right now I'm powering through the more-or-less final draft on Stealing Fire.

A couple of recommendations: a book collection/cataloguing/community website called goodreads.com. It has the usual stuff about being able to upload info about your books, something I find particularly enjoyable since the real things are currently stuffed into a cupboard back home. Books, I'm sure you'll agree, are meant to live on shelves, not in darkened cupboards.

One of my favourite authors in the Eighties was Lewis Shiner. I first encountered him in a short story called 'Jeff Beck', printed in Asimov's. It was in the second or third copy of the magazine I ever bought, about the time I started buying Asimov's regularly for what turned out to be several years. That story particularly appealed to me because I was learning to play guitar at the time (although I was more of a Jimmy Page and Hendrix fan). Looking back at it now, it makes even more sense than it did then. I did in fact learn to play guitar at least passably. One could easily read the story and substitute 'writing fiction' for 'playing music'. Shiner also wrote one of my favourite novels - Glimpses.

He's got a new non-genre book out called Black & White which sounds very interesting, but even more interesting is that he's in the process of putting every single piece of fiction he's ever had published up on the net. I consider this to be a very, very good thing because until relatively recently Shiner was very much in the 'whatever happened to ...' category of writers. He was published very regularly in Asimov's and F&SF before fading off the radar during the Nineties. I've missed his stuff. He has a website where you can also download the complete text of his new book.

As an aside, I have a still-growing list of free downloaded fiction, much of it from Tor. All of it together is in itself reason enough, should I ever have the cash, to buy an epaper device if and when they become cheap enough.

Stealing Fire

Since I'm in an excerpt-posting mood, here's the first page (or 250-ish words) from the start of Stealing Fire, the sequel to Stealing Light I've been writing for Tor. It's due in by the 1st of July, so busy, busy, busy.

"PROLOGUE

1. THE LONG WAR

Orion-Perseus Arm/Milky Way
32,000 light years from Galactic Core/2,375 light years from nearest edge of Consortium space
0.15 GC Revs since Start of Hostilities (approx. 15,235 years [Terran])

Inside a Shoal reconnaissance corvette, lost and hunted through a dense tangle of stars and hydrogen clouds a thousand light-years wide, a Bandati spy was being tortured by having his wings pulled off one by one.

In order to accommodate the prisoner, an air-breather, the bare steel vault of the corvette’s interrogation chamber had been drained of its liquid atmosphere. Misted brine formed heavy, wobbling droplets in the oxygen/nitrogen mix that had replaced it, floating in the zero gee like tiny watery lenses.

The Bandati had been pinned to an upright panel placed in the centre of the chamber, where the floor dipped to form a shallow, stepped well. The Shoal-member known as Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals noted the enormous iron spike that had been driven through the creature's lower chest in such a way that it was held immobile without, to his surprise, immediately threatening its continued survival. Nonetheless, it was not difficult to discern from the Bandati's ceaseless struggling that it was in some considerable distress.

Cables had been epoxied to the chamber wall directly above the scout's head, and hooks attached to the trailing tips of these cables had been inserted into the outermost edges of its five remaining wings. The tension in these cables pulled the wings wide, as if the Bandati were frozen in the act of gliding through the dense atmosphere of the world on which his kind had originated. Trader was reminded of a display he had once seen of small winged invertebrates, row after row of colourful dead husks pinned to a wall, carefully mounted, labelled and categorised.

Clearly, the interrogators had been in a creative mood when they had been ordered to extract as much information as possible from the spy."

Paperback Out

Today's the day - the paperback of Stealing Light is now out in the United Kingdom, and other places as well as and when it becomes available.

Here's an excerpt of the first page:

"Standard Consortium Date: 03.06.2538
25 kilometres south of Port Gabriel, Redstone Colony
Port Gabriel Incident +45 minutes

It was like waking up and finding you’d just sleepwalked through the gates of hell.

Dakota drew in a sharp breath, feeling like she’d first awakened into existence only a moment before. She stood stock still for several seconds, the touch of freezing rain clear and sharp on her skin.

Trying to take it all in.

Bodies were scattered all around her, under a slate-grey sky from which snow fell in sporadic squalls. Most had been cut down as they ran for safety. It was a scene of appalling carnage.

She remembered with dazzling clarity what it had felt like to kill them.

Her hands hung uselessly by her sides, Consortium-issue assault pistol still gripped in one fist. Fat-bellied Consortium transports rumbled far overhead, dropping down from orbit, looking to salvage something – anything - from the disaster of the assault.

The worst thing was that she remembered so much. Every moment, every scream, and every death: it was something she was going to have to live with for the rest of her life.

That made the decision to kill herself a lot easier."

Earthquakes and Arguments

Had my first earthquake the other night. Em reckoned it was maybe 3 on the Richter Scale, but I don't have the necessary experience to pass judgement. It was like a gentle rocking motion, entirely silent, for seven or eight seconds. There was something weirdly comforting about it, as if the Gods of the Continental Drift were rocking me to my sleep.

Anyway: Richard Morgan, another Glasgow author, recently posted online an essay originally written for an anthology in which he decries the SF field for its infighting and general bitchiness. I can well understand some of his bewilderment given that he arrived on the scene, convention and community-wise, relatively recently.

"... I'm still a relative novice in this place. I mean, I've always read SF and Fantasy, for the reason I guess most people read anything -- because I like it. But before the publication of my first novel, five years ago, I knew next to nothing about SF fandom, had never attended a con in my life, and was quite unaware there might be anything to warrant the wielding of such savage rhetorical weaponry. So I was a bit (actually a lot) taken aback to see these squabbles arising, and even more taken aback to learn that this kind of back-biting is nothing new in the genre. Trawl back through the short history of SF and you can see the exact same bitching and lekking oneupmanship set loose time and time again. New Wave writers lambast and laugh at their predecessors from the so-called Golden Age. Individual authors ally or square up to each other with ludicrous intensity. Lots of furious lit. crit. goes flying this way and that. Splat! Pow! Blood on the dancefloor. Oh, but the times, they are a-changing -- here comes the hard-SF revival to "take back" the genre, to barricade themselves in the genre cabin with their technophilic faith and new frontier spirit and hold off the weirdos for a while. Then cyberpunk kicks down the door all over again, proclaims itself dangerous and subversive (but over here, in this corner, some New Wave purists scoff).

And so it goes, drearily onward until we wind up squabbling all over again about how cool and cutting edge and unlike other fantasy writers we are in the New Weird, or more recently how hopelessly wrong and dangerously irresponsible anyone is if they're writing Faster than Light drives into their SF, or (see above) how goddamn fucking militant, humorless, and annoying anyone is who says it's off base to write FTL into ...

So forth."

I have great sympathy for what Richard says, yet at the same time I'm not sure I agree one hundred per cent. Now, I admit to openly dissing 'high' fantasy on this blog, although at the same time I made it clear it was purely a matter of personal taste; for a lot of people an interest in SF has gone hand in hand with an interest in fiction of the Tolkien/Elric/White Gold Wielder variety - just not me. In that respect, maybe I'm one of the guilty ones.

But still, I can't help feeling that all this posturing, infighting, and declarations of intent are the signs of a healthy genre. The reason people are arguing with each other is because they're passionate about what they believe in. I don't know that I'd necessarily prefer it if those same people were instead dispassionate about SF. If people weren't announcing manifestos, having flame-wars with each other and generally having wildly varying ideas about what sf is or isn't ... it would be kind of boring.

Wouldn't it?

To me, I'd say all the bitchiness is a sign that things aren't nearly so moribund within the genre as some have claimed. I'm not saying the arguments and fighting are always healthy, or necessarily mature; but I am saying it feels more alive than some genteel, mannered alternative. At least the way things are, it feels like people give a damn.

Find Shark, Jump Shark

I saw Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull on Saturday night. It was like watching a sweded production of a script so terrifyingly bad it had been locked in a steel vault inside a military warehouse far from the eyes of man, but with A-list actors and an actual budget. As I watched my youthful memories of Raiders of the Lost Ark being thoroughly vandalised, I wondered if the stars had been kidnapped for real as well as on the screen; there was a wild-eyed look to Ford et al that made me suspect they were dragged from their Bel Air beds in the middle of the night and forced to perform at gunpoint in some remote Eastern European state.

In the first forty minutes or so, Indiana survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a fridge, and his son performs a series of Tarzan-like stunts swinging vine-to-vine in the jungle with sufficient Spiderman-like dexterity he catches up with a truck in an action sequence designed to make Scooby Doo cartoons look like bleak exercises in Dogma-style realism. After that, it gets progressively sillier until it achieves a kind of reality-destabilising ur-silliness, whereupon you feel the urge to bite off one of your own fingers and use the stump to scrawl a warning on the floor of the cinema not to watch the movie.

According to an article in The Independent:

"It seems that Spielberg, the director, and Ford, the star, had severe doubts about mystic, crystal skulls as the story line for the new Indiana Jones story, the first to appear since 1989. One of the reasons for the long delay, according to Hollywood gossip, is that Spielberg and Ford hated the skulls idea, put forward by George Star Wars Lucas, who wrote the script. But after a dozen re-writes, they were brought around."

Brought around? Brought around? Bribed? Threatened? The severed heads of Greys mailed to them? Enough money to buy Mexico? Oh Steven, Steven. You might as well drag that festering Jaws prop out of the garage and take a running jump over it.

No Smoking

Differences between Taipei and home that have begun to seep in: hardly anyone smokes. Walk into a newsagent back home, and there's always a vast, shrine-like display of cigarettes. Hundreds of packets. Walk into a newsagent here - or a 7/11 as they're known - you see about three, stuck up next to the counter. Go into a bar in Glasgow, it's guaranteed to have a mob of people standing and shivering in the rain outside and desperately clutching lit fags. You don't see that anywhere here.

Oh sure, you walk around the streets, and you see one or two people smoking. And I mean one or two. It just doesn't seem to interest people here so much. They just don't seem to be driven to clog up their lungs and everyone else's with foul, polluting smog.

It's nice.