“Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring.”

and

If printed books do become obsolete in the next 50 years, Franzen is pleased that at least he won’t have to see it. “One of the consolations of dying is that [you think], ‘Well, that won’t have to be my problem’.”

Here’s to hoping that Mr. Franzen was quoted wildly out of context, because there’s nothing to say to that other than, “Oy gevalt.”

Let me help you out with this, Jonathan: the medium is not the message.

A physical book is just a thing.

(Also, Luddism isn’t nearly as cute as Luddites seem to think it is. But I’ll save that for another time.)

When Darin and I moved from Los Angeles back to the Silicon Valley, I think we donated about 30 boxes of books to whatever charity organization we were gifting with our things. When we moved from the house into the rental house at the beginning of the remodel, I think we got rid of another 30 boxes. When we moved from the rental back into the house, we were so determined to get rid of physical objects that even though we’d started to move to mostly e-books, we still had another 20 boxes of books we gave away.

We didn’t give away the ideas.

We didn’t give away the amazing writing (or lack thereof — you know who I’m talking about).

We gave away the things.

We had several bookcases built into our house, mostly by the front door and in my office), and that’s pretty much all the bookcases we need. If I really went for it, I could get rid of at least a third of the books in my office and not even notice.

Here’s the thing, Jonathan: in today’s brave new world, you can still have a book on paper if you really need it. There are tons and tons of print-on-demand places — in fact, your big fancy-schmancy publishers are probably using the same POD outfits that self-published authors are. We just don’t have to, anymore. Now I can have my books any time, anywhere I want.

You know what else I can have, Jonathan?

• Bigger print anytime, if I want it, without having to pay the exorbitant large-print edition prices.
• A copy of the book seconds after I hear about it.
• Books that have been out on the market more than 3 months. Try that in a bookstore, these days.

I don’t want to fill my house with more stuff. I still want to read lots of books. E-books are an awesome way to fulfill both of those needs.

Besides which: bookstores are not really great places right now. For one thing, they’re hard to find: here in Silicon Valley, where we’re all living in the future, there’s a Barnes and Noble at the Pruneyard, and a Barnes and Noble over on Stevens Creek and…uh…yeah, that’s all I got. The biggest independent bookstore in the area I can think of (actually, to be honest, its the only indie bookstore I can think of) is Kepler’s, which closed once in 2005 and, now with the retirement of the owner effective today, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it went out of business again real soon now. There are NO Barnes and Nobles in the entire city of San Francisco (although they do have more independent bookstores).

I knew Borders was going to go out of business when I realized that their entire floor design was built around their bargain books giveaway, which was always placed right inside the front door, no matter what Borders I went to. Barnes and Noble, which I always liked better because they were far, far more likely to actually have the book I was looking for, has replaced its yards and yards of bookshelves with games and caps and other knickknacks most decidedly un-booklike.

Making it far more likely that they don’t have the book I’m looking for anyhow. Chain bookstores haven’t made discovering new books a better task for the past number of years. An independent bookstore like Kepler’s is great for that (always found something on their tables), but they’re 25 miles away. And I don’t like to be the kind of person who discovers something in a shop and then buys it online — if I discover it in your store, you deserve the sale.

And as I’ve said: I don’t want physical books any more.

So we’ll keep our collections of Terry Pratchett books and Patrick O’Brien books and the Harry Potter series on paper. And a really kickass beautifully laid-out and photographed cookbook collection. But 99% of the time I don’t need actual physical books to enjoy them, Jonathan. I read them for the words. That’s what I remember about the experience. Not how whatever device — Kindle, iPhone, or paper and cardboard — felt in my hand.

Oh, and that book smell people are always yammering on about? Glue and mold, among other things. You’re welcome.

§

Update: There’s an article in the paper about Kepler’s challenges and how they’re planning on facing them.

This month’s book is The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis. None of the kids has had a chance to read the book yet, so today we had a discussion of some of the background of the book, which concerns a young girl in Afghanistan who pretends to be a boy in order to support her family. Since we didn’t know anything about the book, we did some fun stuff, like marking off a 10-foot by 10-foot square in the middle of the carpeting to show the size of the place the protagonist lives in, and we discussed the subject matter.

This is what I learned:

• Some kids hadn’t heard of Afghanistan.
• None of them knew where it was, although Sophia came closest with “near India.”
• Some kids had heard the word “Taliban.” They didn’t know what it meant, though.
• A few knew there had been a war there recently. Even fewer knew that the US had been involved.
• A couple knew that the predominant religion there was Islam.
• Almost none of them knew anything about the conditions for women there.
• Almost all of them tried the hummus I made, and several tried the dried fruits that another mom brought.

We had a discussion about the title. None of the kids knew what the word “breadwinner” meant. We discussed why bread was slang for money, and why bread is so important. (I’m guessing not many of these kids have had to recite “Give us this day our daily bread” too often.)

I have no idea how atypical I was as a child (okay, okay: I was very atypical), but I watched the Evening News with Walter Cronkite every  night with my dad. I didn’t always understand what “Vietnam” or “energy crisis” or “M2″ meant, but I had some exposure to the news. A lot of these kids — from very well-informed, very successful families — are not getting this. I only point this out not to rag on these kids (they’re in 6th grade, after all) but to point out that it’s never too early to start talking to your kids about world events. Or to use big words like “breadwinner” with them. They were really, really interested! They want to know this stuff!

I have high hopes for book discussion next time.

• Finish my rewrite of my first ever novel.
• Write the second novel in that series.
• Finish the Macbeth novel. Especially before Rob kills me. Because frankly that would suck.
• Finish the superhero novel.
• Finish that one project I’m working on under a pseudonym that already has many fans! Which is totally cool.
• Send out one play to at least five contests.
• Do this with at least three plays.
• Write several more 10-minute plays.
• Write a one-act play.
• Write a full-length play.
• Send these out.
• Work on a list of possible ideas for a screenplay.

You know, for someone who complains she doesn’t have enough ideas, I certainly do have plenty of projects to work on.

And seeing it laid out like that reinforces my desire to have serious writing time!

Now, I haven’t Googled to see how “true” this novel actually is. Who the hell cares? It’s a rousing, cinematic ride (by a noted screenwriter) through the horrors and craziness of the Siege of Leningrad in 1941. The narrator, Lev (Benioff’s grandfather), is caught by the Soviet police after looting the body of a German paratrooper (while looking for food, because there’s none to be had anywhere in the city) and released only under one condition: he and another prisoner, a young soldier named Kolya) are charged with doing the impossible. They have to find a dozen eggs. If they don’t, they go to prison — and the conditions in Leningrad have deteriorated so far that the authorities had  stopped even feeding the prisoners, because there’s no food. It is the ultimate damned-if-they-do situation.

It’s a crazy story, with story points and narrative details reminding us that not only does war suck, total war really sucks, and WOW did the Russians have it bad during the war. City of Thieves takes you through Leningrad during wintertime, when you have to fight death, disease, starvation, cannibals, snipers, and the invading German army. You will not be bored reading this book.

I’ve run into a few things lately that make me say, Are you kidding? Are you trying to get rid of me as a customer?

I’ve been wondering if it might be worth switching over to an airline points card, to be honest.

I have a physical Kindle–the Kindle 3, in case that makes a difference. And I have an iPad. I have read books on both. I still think the reading experience is pretty much a wash, frankly. (And now that iBooks has a night-time reading mode of white text on a black background, I’d say reading on the iPad is slightly better than the Kindle.) However, with an extra year-plus of use of both devices under my belt, I have many, many more things to say about the pros and cons of the Kindle device, the Kindle app/ecosystem, and iBooks.

Problem #1: Figure Out Collections, People

I’m guessing the problem here is that the engineers who are designing these things don’t actually read books or something. I don’t know. I have a Kindle collection of (drum roll, please) 711 items. I am always checking the Kindle bestsellers page to see what’s hot…particularly on the Free Bestseller lists. You can learn a lot about how to go about marketing a self-published book from this page, writers. Anyhow, visits to the have inspired me to download a crapload of books.

Yes, my Unread folder is insane. It’s like a To Be Read pile, only it’s not taking up physical space in my house any more.

I have attempted to take control of my books by dividing them into what Amazon calls Collections. I file each book as I get it into two folders: the Unread folder (because, duh, haven’t read it yet) and a genre folder that I created (Romance, SF, Mystery, whatever). Strangely, despite having downloaded 100% of my books from Amazon, none of the books have genre tags attached to them, so I have to investigate what the book and figure out where it goes. After I read a book, I delete it from the Unread folder.

I’ve done this with seven hundred and eleven books. (Maybe less about 15, because I haven’t sorted those yet.) Once, back around when I had a mere 300 books, my Kindle sneezed and lost all of my Collections. I didn’t lose the books, just the way they were organized. There was some way that I could get all of my Collections back without much effort on my part, but how to do that was not at all obvious (and using an application like Calibre is an exercise in the lovable world of Open Source No Thank You), so I ended up refiling every single one again. If I lose my Collections again, I will not refile them, certainly not with 711 books, and Amazon provides no easy way of keeping these books sorted.

Even worse, however, is that the Collections do not propagate to other devices. Collections are specific to my Kindle device, not my Kindle account the road and would like to pick up with the book I’ve been reading, I have to remember the name of the book. Or the author’s name. Or something. If I’ve been reading a Regency romance novel, often all I can remember is “guy with a title blah blah feisty debutante blah Almack’s.”

Unless the book I’ve been reading has made a gigantic impression on me, I don’t remember enough about it to download it to the Kindle app on my iPhone. (Which is actually a really fabulous lesson on “How to make your novel stand out” and “What is memorable about a book.” But that’s another entry.)

On iBooks, however, having all of your books available to you is an extremely simple process:

1. Click on the “Books” button.
2. Add new collection name. 
3. On main page, click on the “Edit” button.
4. Select as many books as you want. (This is so damned better than Amazon’s extremely clumsy one-book-at-a-time-I’m-going-to-kill-myself-with-boredom method.) 
5. Click on the “Move” button.
6. Choose new collection to move them to.

The problem with Collections becomes really obvious on Kindle if you have more than ten books. For one thing, it takes forever to sort them into their folders. (Like I said, if I ever lose the Collections on those 711 books again…yeah, that’s it, I’m done.) The only useful thing is that the last book opened is the book at the top of the list, so it’s pretty easy to find what you’ve been reading.

On iBooks you can sort by cover art or in a list (where you can sort by Titles, Authors, or Categories, which are the genre assigned to the book, either by the iBooks store or by you, the user, in the Info field).

If you sort by cover art, of course, the last book opened is the first one on the bookshelves, so you always know what the last book you had open was.

Advantage: iBooks. No question. Hands down.

Problem #2: Loaning Books

This is the one frustrating the hell out of me this week.

The first books I bought for my Kindle device were the Hunger Games trilogy. Sophia is old enough to read them and wanted to, which I was fine with. Not so fine: her seeing the other books in my Kindle collection. Instead, I loaned her the book so she could read it on her iOS device.

Today she asked me to reloan her Mockingjay.

According to my Kindle, it was still on loan.

According to the “Manage Your Kindle” page on Amazon, I didn’t own it at all. (Of course, I’ve never found any of the Hunger Games books through this page, so no big deal.)

On an Amazon page for a book I’ve already bought, I usually get this message:

Mockingjay did not give me that line about “Loan This Book.”

I couldn’t access Mockingjay on my Kindle, and I couldn’t loan it to my daughter. Effectively, I no longer owned the book.

I had to send a message to Amazon–and WOW is their Help page of no help whatsoever! I got a maze of twisty little popup menus, none of which applied to my situation–and their service rep reset the Loaned bit assigned to Mockingjay by hand. Their email responding to my inquiry was of no help whatsoever (“1. Please check and make sure the device is fully charged.”) and I gave their “Rate This Response” a low rating.

If the only way to access my own damn book is through your Customer Service rep? This rates: NOT GOOD.

Contrast this with loaning a book via iBooks. Now, admittedly, iBooks does not allow you to loan a book to any old friend in the universe, and that is a major fail on their part. However, if you and your loved ones have Home Sharing enabled, you copy the book from their account into your account and sync with your device.

You are now done with the process. And everybody can read the book at the same time. The book’s not held hostage to one pair of eyes.

Advantage: iBooks. Is there a question about this?

Problem #3: Finding New Books

There’s no question about this: Amazon’s store is so much better than just about any other shopping experience out there. And the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature is useful.

Browsing the iBooks store in iTunes is just…annoying.

Advantage: Kindle. This design fail is so spectacular on Apple’s part that I wonder what in the hell is going on over there and, no, I don’t have someone I can ask.

Neither online bookstore is as good as wandering around a good bookstore though, but I expect in the next year or two the real-world experience will disappear altogether. Despite not buying very many books on paper these days, I am actually upset about this.

Problem #4: Keeping Your Place In A Book

If I do manage to load a book onto my Kindle device and into my Kindle app on my iPad, the Kindle’s Whispersync method of making sure that you’re always on the same page works great.

Until I finish the damn book. Because if I decide to read it again, the Kindle system always thinks I’m on the last page if I open it on the other device. Thereby losing my place.

It’s extremely irritating.

My friend Nina and her husband share one Kindle account (so they don’t have to go through the annoyances of loaning a book, see above). Theoretically, they should be able to read the same book at the same time, but if someone finished it first, they both finish it. At this point, they have to use bookmarks to individually mark their places, and woe to them who forgets to adjust the placement of their bookmark.

Advantage: iBooks. If I start a book over, it puts me on that page no matter what device I’m using. And sharing books is much, much easier.

Problem #5: Turning the page

The biggest problem I’ve had reading on my iPad in bed is that my right hand gets tired having to be the one tapping the screen to turn the page forward. I can’t switch off between hands. The Kindle device has buttons on both sides that allow you to advance or go back.

Advantage: The Kindle, but only the Kindles with physical buttons. I’m pretty sure I’d have the same problem with the Kindle Touch. The Kindle wins for being lighter (except if, as in my case, it has a heavy leather case on it) and for having go-forward/go-back buttons on both sides.

Problem #6: Losing Your Device

Losing my Kindle would be a total bummer. However, it’s $100, which as electronic gadgets go is not a terrible loss, and if I wanted to replace it with one of these new Kindles and didn’t mind getting ads thrown at me, I could replace it for $80.

Losing my iPad would be a severe bummer, to the point where the iPad stays at home except when taken with in a special bag and watched carefully.

Advantage: Kindle. Because it’s a cheap piece of replaceable plastic crap.

I keep hearing that iBooks has got to step up its game, and I don’t see it that way at all. Slowly but surely, I’m moving my book collection to iBooks. I wish their selection were better, but it is improving all the time.

Now that I’ve had my Kindle 3 for a month, I’ve had friends ask me which do I prefer: reading on the iPad or on the Kindle? And it’s really no contest: I much much much prefer reading on the iPad.

Yes, LCD display and all.

I am quite impressed with how the screen on the Kindle looks. E-ink is really good technology and it does look like a printed page. But I read all day on a computer screen anyhow, so reading a little bit more on one at night is not a big hassle. It doesn’t make my eyes any more tired than they already are. (Now, if I’m going to give up screens altogether, that would be one thing. But we’re not talking about doing that.)

The Kindle is also much lighter than the iPad (8.5 ounces vs. 1.5 or 1.6 pounds, depending on model). However, I tend to lie in bed with the iPad propped on my rib cage, so the weight really doesn’t bother me.

What the Kindle is better for (as far as I’m concerned):

• Taking outside the house. Losing the Kindle would definitely suck, no question. But $139 vs. the cost of an iPad (which has WAY more data on it than the Kindle does)…yeah, no contest there. To be honest, though, the real cost of the Kindle is closer to $189, because I had to buy a cover with built-in light for it—that screen ain’t durable, and the Kindle screen is useless in anything less than bright light.
• Small. It fits in my bag of holding purse. That’s convenient.

What the iPad is better for:

• Everything else.

The UI on the Kindle sucks. Let me not hold back: it’s terrible. I understand that it’s gotten much better since the original Kindle, so my hat is off to you, Original Kindle owner, for plowing through. The page forward/page back buttons are annoying, but I’ve gotten used to them. Accidentally scrolling ahead 15 pages when I meant to scroll back? Yeah, that sucked the first time, and the second time made me scream (quietly). Scrolling through the list of books I have in there to find the book I want to read when I can’t remember the title or author? That’s nearly unforgivable.

But the teeny-tiny keys for entering text are annoying enough to get me to not use them. True story: Every time I’ve decided to buy a book for my Kindle, I

1. put the Kindle down,
2. pick the iPad up,
3. go to Amazon,
4. buy the book,
5. put the iPad down,
6. pick the Kindle back up.

Yeah. That’s going to convince me to use my Kindle for anything other than a convenience on the road.

Here’s what raised my blood pressure: organizing my book collection.

I buy all of my Kindle books from Amazon. I’m willing to bet folding money Amazon knows what genre these books are in. Maybe several genres, but I bet each book could be marked with just one genre when it gets downloaded.

Does Amazon do this? They do not.

But what does Amazon have? They have something called “Collections”, which are groupings of books I name and arrange (using those teeny-tiny keys on the teeny-tiny keyboard…yeesh). So, I spend a lot of time organizing my 200+ (that’s out of control) ebooks into these Collections on my Kindle device. And the Collections do not propagate to the other locations where I might read my Kindle books (ie, my iPhone and iPad).

In fact, there is no organizing AT ALL in the Kindle app. Nice. So if I carry my entire ebook collection around with me…it becomes a disaster to try to find anything.

(As for non-Amazon books…Apparently there is some way to upload non-Amazon books to the Kindle, but a)it’s not obvious and b)involves mailing something to the email address associated with my Kindle and c)costs me 10 cents per, or something. If I’m going to spend that much effort getting a book on to a reading device, I’ve got a better way. Yes, it’s drag-and-drop to iTunes for syncing with my iPad and iPhone for one-stop shopping.)

(And so you ask: Why do I buy the vast majority of my books from Amazon? Two reasons: a)they still have a bigger selection, although I’ve started searching the iBooks store first, and b)I have an Amazon points Visa card, meaning most of the books I’m buying at Amazon are therefore…free.)

Seriously, UI counts. Yes, it is Amazon’s problem if this annoys me, because iBooks doesn’t do that. My books get loaded into whatever device under whatever category I put them, so every single place I load that book, I can look for it by title, author, AND category. (Yes, I realize this is not technically a win for the iPad, just for iBooks, but this is a major way in which Kindle, whether on the Kindle or on my Kindle app for iPhone, just fails.)

Here’s another example: the way you move around the page on the Kindle is via a 4-sided rocker with a button in the center. It works pretty well if you have a nail long enough to center on one of the sides; not so well if you have a large clumsy finger that either hits the wrong side or the button in the center. You use the rocker to move down the list of options on the page. And you do have to move DOWN the entire page; you can’t go “around the horn” and go UP to go to the last entry on the page.

There might be reasons for that, but wow, would a simple UI change make it easier to navigate on a page with a long list of entries.

Here’s why the iPad is better:

• My eyes don’t feel any more strained reading on that than on the Kindle. So stop telling me that they do, okay?
• My hands don’t feel any more strained. Honest, I keep hearing about how heavy the iPad is, and I haven’t found it to be problem. I prop the iPad on my tummy. I turn pages. Then I’m done.
• I don’t have to have a light on in the bedroom when I’m reading. This is nice for when Darin is asleep and I’m not.
• Finding books on Amazon is easier via iPad than via the Kindle.
• Paging forward and backward is easier (touchscreen kicks ass over teeny, terrible form-factor keyboard). My hands get tired whether using the touchscreen or the little buttons over the length of time I spend reading, so I haven’t noticed a winner there.
• Moving within a book is easier.

I’ll get into the Kindle app vs the iBooks app another time. (Okay, okay, here’s one: you get a bigger chunk of the book when you get a sample from iBooks than you do from Amazon.) The divide between these two devices is rather stunning, however. I know devising a whole new device that allows you to read your books with e-ink must be tough but…suck it up and redo the software, boys. You haven’t nailed it yet.

Update: Just saw the Borders ebooks app for iPhone. Apparently they have something called “What I’m Reading” that propagates all the books you’re currently reading from device to device. Learn from this, Amazon.

Update 10/4/10: Adding Collections to my Kindle device has had an unexpected effect. I now only use the Kindle device, because otherwise I can’t find the book I’ve been reading. (Honestly, when all I can remember is “It’s a Regency involving a titled bloke written by a woman with a flowery sounding name” and 85 possible titles, I’m not going to download each one from the Archive to see if that’s it. My memory’s terrible these days, okay?)

This pretty much means I no longer read my Kindle books when I’m on the go and don’t have my Kindle device with me. FWIW.

Here’s what you need to know about reading books on your iPad:

• I think iBooks is a really nice application. I like the layout, I like the page-turning, I like the fact that I don’t need to have the light on in bed to use it. Take that, Kindle. (A friend of mine was in and out of the hospital all last year and said that she couldn’t have used a Kindle, because she always had a roommate and couldn’t turn on the light.) And I already stare at a screen all day; hasn’t hurt my eyes any. You should probably know that, even post-Lasik, I have very bad eyesight. I don’t think it’s the screen, though.

• Buying books from iTunes store: you don’t need to put in your password for any of the free books (at least, I haven’t yet). You do for the books with a price. This actually is an advantage for iBooks, because it stops me and makes me think. The 1-click on Kindle is completely deadly to my bank account.

• You CAN read your own .epub format books on iBooks. I’ve read a number of places that you must buy your books from the iBooks store and this is just not true. Here’s what you do:
  
  1. Drag the .epub files to iTunes.
  2. Sync your iPad

  You’re now done. Have a nice soy latte and read your dang book.

• Scrivener (the thinking writer’s writing application of choice) will soon support saving in .epub format. So you can export your novel as .epub, upload to your iPad, and read (and, hopefully, annotate) soon.

  (I should make this clear, because the developer’s made this very clear: Scrivener itself will not be on iPad! But easy export of .epub files (ie, your novel in progress) for leisurely reading on an iPad = much win.)

• I read many, many confusing webpages on how to make an .epub file, which involved voodoo and changing file extensions and other horrible tasks that frankly I use the modern computer to get away from. Eventually I found Sigil, which is an editor that creates .epub format books. I’ve found that it sucks as anything other than an .epub creator—it’s not the most robust editor I’ve ever run across. But it does create .epub books with only a little effort on my part, so currently I’m using this to create books from text files. If anyone has a better suggestion, let me know.

• The Kindle app is MUCH improved. Before they updated it for use on iPad, all that was available was the iPhone app. So you could read your book on a tiny little section of this giant screen, or you could blow up the app using the 2x button, and the books looked like crap because the text wasn’t scaled, it was blown-up bitmaps. Now it’s designed to use the entire iPad screen with the proper fonts and it looks good. I like the two layouts of the library of books (in a list or as separate graphic images).

• Not anything to do with the iPad, but while we’re on the subject… Here is my take on the Kindle for Mac app: 1988 called, they’d like their GUI back. Seriously, Amazon, did you pass this off to some exec’s 13-year-old kid as their home computing project? Stop it and hire a read Cocoa developer.

• As of today, Stanza and Ereader have not been updated for iPad. This makes them useless. I found them pretty useless before (getting books from Fictionwise and Ereader has been an exercise in frustration for me more than once, and when compared to Amazon’s 1-click… no comparison) and they’re not helping themselves out.

• Screenwriter John August has a whole post on “Reading scripts on the iPad.” He points you to the best .pdf app (as of today, obviously; this situation could change at any moment). As soon as these apps allow for annotation (and export of said notes), the iPad could be very useful for writers.

I haven’t tried writing much on the iPad yet, and we don’t have the keyboard dock or anything. I guess I could use one of Darin’s wireless keyboards, but at the moment I’m spending way too much time playing Flight Control HD. I mean, using one of the book-reading apps.

All of Darin and my books, however: packed.

In an attempt to get some interesting reading material here and there, however, we have actually ventured back into bookstores from time to time and picked up a few books. If they don’t make the cut, out they go! (We’re really good at letting things go right now.) But we don’t have many books around at the moment. Darin, who is not a big believer in e-books, is always looking for something to read, so in a fit of boredom he picked up one of the “flaky” books I’d bought and read it.

“This is really good,” he said. By which he meant: full of substance and not so very flaky after all.

The book is The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, takes 10 Great Ideas from ancient philosophical and religious traditions and investigates them using scientific studies: Is the Golden Rule so golden, for instance? What are the divisions we live with in our daily life, and what do they mean? (For example, mind vs. body, left vs. right, new vs. old.) Is it better to live a life with or without adversity? What in the hell is happiness, anyhow?

The best thing about this book is not the ground he covers, although that’s pretty good. The best thing about this book is Haidt’s writing is immensely clear and conversational: you feel as though he’s discussing these ideas, right here with you, right now. Instead of either being too esoteric or too chatty, he manages to keep the discussion at an adult level that doesn’t presume that you, too, have a degree in philosophy or psychology.

By the way, I can give you one of the takeaways from this book right now: happiness is achievable, right now, no matter who you are or what your circumstances are. So no excuses, people.

One of the best parts of the book is how he shows that meditation, cognitive psychology, and Prozac are all equally effective for managing your mind—the book has, in fact, inspired me to finally give meditation a shot again. (If I manage to keep the practice up, I’ll report back about any and all effects I get from it.)

Yay, Sigil!

Re: the ongoing e-book format wars: damn, is there nothing more annoying that downloading an e-book…and then discovering you can’t upload it to the e-book reader of your choice (in my case, an iPhone) because you picked the wrong damn format? Yes, yes, I know: “Diane, you’re a dumbass.”

But still: trying to pick the right format out of the many competing ones…is there any wonder I just buy from Amazon and eliminate the middleman?

I have some .pdf files of old books I would like to read, but they’re not formatted correctly for my iPhone ebook reader (whether Kindle…or eReader…or Stanza…or B&N eReader (which doesn’t read the same books as my eReader/Fictionwise app, dammit)).

What I’ve done so far is open the .pdf file in Lexcycle Stanza and save it as an .epub file, which is the same thing as a .zip file, only with a different extension. Everything I know about the .epub format I learned during this tutorial, in case anyone wants to double-check my knowledge.

So I change the extension on the .epub file and unpack the zip, which gives me

• mimetype
• META-INF folder
• OEBPS folder

Great. I edit the HTML info in the content.obf and toc.ncx files (and maybe that’s a problem, because those are UNIX executables when I open them, but when I save them, they become text files), and I edit the various header information in the separate chapter files.

I save the .zip file, change the extension back to .epub, and upload to my iPhone…whereupon I get the error “Failed to download and import…” because the information in the container.xml file is wrong.

Well, I didn’t touch the damn container.xml file. I could understand if one of the other files were causing the problem, but they’re not.

My friend Rob recommends I just use DropBook, which I have now given a shot (but where is it putting the completed book file? I can’t find it anywhere).

This process is very frustrating. And I know that right now the ebook market is the Wild, Wild West, but in case book publishers would like to know why ebooks haven’t taken over the world, this is why: it’s too confusing, there are too many variables, and there are too many damn formats.

During the oh-so-crucial shopping season of September through December, during which glossy magazines swell like so many Octomoms with their endless advertisements, Vanity Fair led me to invent a new verb, “to vanityfair,” which means, “to rip out the gigantic quantity of ads from the magazines, sometimes reducing its thickness by over a third.”

Every so often I’d say, “God, this magazine sucks, I have to stop getting it,” but then they’d have another article that was totally wonderful and unexpected and I’d start liking it again.

But they’ve done it. They’ve finally managed to get me off my ass and cancel my subscription.

Last month, they had Jessica Simpson on the cover. Why? I don’t know. The story was all about how she’s not fat, she’s gorgeous. I don’t know that much about her, and I knew when I first heard the “Jessica Simpson is fat” stories that they were all an attempt to get some attention and sympathy. To have Vanity Fair waste my time with that story made me go, “Oh, please, do we really not have any celebrities any more?”

(In fact, we don’t, not really. The reason we have Brad and Angelina on the checkout stand every week—well, maybe you do; thankfully, my supermarket does not have checkout tabloids, yay Lunardi’s—is that they are recognizable to a vast audience and have great crossover appeal. The great expansion of the entertainment infosphere through hundreds of channels and the internet and iPods and such has led to inevitable schisms of domain—now there are tons and tons of celebrities, all of whom are known to a smaller and smaller audience. Movies are targeted to extremely narrow audiences: the likelihood that anyone over the age of 35 knows the name Shia LaBeouf, let alone what he looks like or how to spell his name, is pretty damn low, which is why he was in that stupid Indiana Jones movie last summer.)

But no, it wasn’t even Jessica Simpson that did me in. It was their 87 millionth article in a row on the great travails caused by Bernie Madoff.

They could not say any louder that they are New York-centric; they couldn’t be any clearer that the magazine is designed to be read by people that range from the Upper West Side to the Long Island Expressway. They have lots of New York things and nothing else. It’s tiresome and incestuous, it really is.

I know Bernie Madoff did a very bad thing. But it’s really not Topic #1 everywhere in the country. It’s really not the most interesting thing to happen ever, you know?

No, apparently Vanity Fair doesn’t know, because in this month’s issue (possibly my last), there’s another goddamn Bernie Madoff article.

The obvious criticism, of course, is that Bernie Madoff is exactly the kind of uber-successful, high-flying financier that Vanity Fair has extolled and sucked up to for years. Their endless investigations of the criminality of the Bush years does not make up for their continual praise of the Bush gang while things were good. (Really bugged me at the time too.)

Anyhow, in case VF is wondering why they lost another subscriber, that’s why!