Yeah, I should just title this “Another goddamn iPad article you can’t seem to get away from.”

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.

At the moment, we have no books at Chez Rental. All of our books are in cardboard boxes in the garage, helpfully labeled “Books.” Well, except for the kids’ books, which were labeled “Girl’s Room: Books” and “Boy’s Room: Books,” and which have been liberated from the garage and into their new rooms.

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.)

Update: Oh frabjous day! Turns out there is shareware that will do precisely what I want! After playing with these various epub guides (and crashing upon the shores of “The metafile needs to be added first and not compressed in the zip file…”), I discovered Sigil, a bare bones (not to be confused with Bare Bones) project with a simple text editor that helps you put together an ebook really, really simply.

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.

I’ve subscribed to Vanity Fair for years. Years. Maybe twenty years. I had a roommate in college who subbed to it, and she described to me its wonderfulness, with pictorial spreads of Giorgio Armani clothing (I had to say, “Who’s that?” because I was so out of it) and gushing suck-up articles on celebrities, balanced with really wonderful and intelligent in-depth political and global work that was clearly being paid for by the pictorial spreads and gushing suck-ups. So be it.

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!

Along with all of this other weird stuff that’s been happening to me over the past 6 or so months—losing weight being the most obvious and least significant—I stopped reading. That’s not exactly correct; I stopped reading novels. I still read the web obsessively (although I haven’t read most of my writing/agent blogs in a million years, and since the election I’ve cut way back on the political ones too), but of the last 20 times Darin and I went into a Borders or Barnes and Noble, I walked out empty-handed 19 times. I picked up books and said, I’ve read this already. Or, What’s interesting here? Nothing interested me.

I did keep hearing about this book Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell, though. I can’t remember why or where. But I kept running across references to this book here and there, and I thought, Well, I’ll get it from the library.

Holy God, I wish I’d bought it; this book was that entertaining.

Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan Catholic, the worst hospital in New York. He is also a former hitman for the Mob, currently in the witness protection program. This works because he spends all of his time at the hospital, and no one with any options (like mob guys) would go near ManCat on a dare, so he never runs into his former associates. Until, of course, he does.

This book is hilarious, violent, vulgar, moving, and one of the most fabulous reads I’ve run across in a long time. Peter Brown is actually a doctor, despite his past, and despite the snark and exhaustion you can see he’s actually getting something out of his new chosen profession. He also explains in detail what he got out of his last job too—how he got into it, why he got out of it. It’s filled with footnotes of information about medical processes and random asides that are interesting and hilarious unto their own right and all of which are…let’s just say, read the damn footnotes, okay? Details you think are just random bits of color keep coming back in strange and unexpected ways.

The book opens with Brown getting mugged on his way to work. It doesn’t stop until the last page. Along the way, you get interchanges like this:

I sit back down. Wipe my nose with my left hand to cover the slow movement of my right hand toward my beeper. “Guy’s got some right buttock and subclavicular pain OUO despite PCA*,” I say. “Looks like a fever, too.”

* Like you care what this means.

This novel also has one of the more, uh, memorable climaxes I’ve ever run across. In fact, I had to skim that part because it was so graphic and deeply disturbing. What’s more disturbing: that’s not even the violent part. The violent part of the climax gets skimmed over in the text, because it’s completely beside the point by the time it actually happens.

Seriously. This book is a total ride.

I read a book last night—it’s either marketed paranormal romance or urban fantasy; those seem to be the same categories these days—that was okay. I think it suffered a lot from sophomore-itis, and that’s a problem a lot of authors run across. Three years for first book, eight months for next one. So, I can live with that.

However, one of the scenes in the book featured one of the most disturbing sex scenes I’ve ever read. I myself don’t find vampires at all sexy— hello, they’re DEAD—but this scene was, I think, supposed to be uber-sexy and I was simply appalled. You know how drinking blood is supposed to be the equivalent of sex to a vampire? Take that to the nth degree. I’m wondering if I’m going to pick up book 3 because not only was the scene icky (it’s a technical term) but it made me dislike the characters.

I don’t think all sex scenes have to be sexy. All they have to do is move the plot along (which, come to think of it, this scene didn’t do either). But I wondered if there was a serious disconnect between me and most readers of paranormal romance/urban fantasy, because none of the reviews on Amazon mention this particular scene in the book, and it’s all I remember.