Kindle Index

 It is a cruel twist of technology that librarians have become one of the most computerized professions.  Whether transporting their bibliographic files across platforms or navigating all the varieties of text processing and information retrieval the technical expertise expected of them seems totally disjointed from the personalities that this profession should attract. Like Amazon, librarians rarely touch books. What librarians want to do, and are rewarded for, is party: events and fund raisers.  The only people in the stacks anymore are kids playing and making out.  Similarly, authors are now plunging the depths of HTML to properly format their works.  Books have become video graphic experiences.  I fully expect hypertext markup language to be taught in Humanities. Professors make use of services to check for plagiarism, grammar and composition.

Except perhaps for Prince, who cut all his own tracks, most people work with others. Authors have constantly railed against publishers and editors. Now we can publish whatever we want. That is not good either. There is a lot written about Shakespeare, he was Catholic, he was Protestant, he was royalist, he was radical, he was someone else. Shakespeare was a producer. He had a piece of the Globe Theater. Every day he was there watching the take and the concessions and most importantly, the audience. When something worked, Shakespeare pumped it up, when it didn’t, he dropped or changed it. Somehow, we have to rebuild that relationship.   

I miss the proofreader and editor if only to have someone to share the blame.  I’m sure even now there are errors and awkwardness in the manuscript I have created on Kindle. The primary function of publishers was gatekeeper.  We have moved the slush pile onto the web.  Richard Brautigan in The Abortion imagined a library where we can check in our masterworks.  Now it exists.  The wonderful thing about blogging is that since so few people read it, I can say whatever I want.  It was also wonderful to get the first book out the door. 

I was preparing to plumb the depths of Font, illustration, and HTML when I simply gave up. The current body of literature manages front cover, table of contents, footnotes, endnotes, indexes, bibliographies and so on without hyperlinks.  That is not such bad company to keep.  I finally just dragged the word document through Mobi, the packaging software Amazon gave authors, and sent it off to Amazon’s Kindle direct self-publishing.  I suppose it is a little embarrassing for a programmer’s book to be more awkward to use, but my experience has taught me that any attempt at cleverness will look silly in the next release.  I hoped that in the future Amazon would give us a means for editing our books on their site and then we can get rid of the superfluous code and format our books with all the features we intend.

How will people find the good books? I suppose fewer people will read my book than read my blog.  Some beats none.  Perhaps authors could petition designated editors for inclusion on recommended reading lists.  This reminds me of the old days of penny dreadfuls, comic books, Mad Magazine and dime store romance.

Since I wrote this, I wrote the blog entry Blogspot Sucks. By some miracle, perhaps someone took pity, or I found the correct incantation, I now have ads on my blog, as you can see. I now have two books out. Kindle has gotten easier. They have an editor to set up the table of contents. Index still doesn’t work. I was sort of able to smuggle in footnotes. It’s very frustrating that I can’t download my books from Amazon to work on them. I would also like to revise my covers rather than start from scratch. Don’t harvest the corners. Good enough, I guess.

The real money is YouTube, or movies.  Good literature makes lousy movies. Perhaps because they have too much respect for the material. Fitzgerald’s real money was as a script doctor. Hemingway couldn’t type. So, his material was easier to adapt.

Audio books next.