So, let’s try something new this year. I resolve (which all but guarantees that I won’t actually succeed in keeping this promise) to write something, at minimum, once a week this year. I do not promise that it will be deep nor particularly insightful, but it will be something that in the end will hopefully encompass a 52-part whole that at least tracks the ups and downs of 2012.  (Or at least serves as a one-post testament to the foundation I’d hoped to establish but ultimately failed to follow through on. Bah.)

So, with one week of 2012 under my belt, it’s been pretty easy to maintain the optimism of the previous post.  I got to physically hold in my hands something I wrote that someone else saw fit to publish– sadly it was not my fiction work (yet!), but it’s movement in the right direction. And there is something intensely satisfying about receiving a comped copy of a book because you’re a little something known as “the author”.  The next step is clearly to get off my keister and finish writing one of my novels so that I can work to add that to the list. Before e-publishing makes physical books a thing of the past.

I’m not as dismissive of that possibility as I once was.  Yes, I still treasure physical copies of books and prefer having that tangible something to hold in my hands and work my way through. Yes, I prefer to spend a few hours wandering the aisles of Barnes & Noble, letting covers grab my attention or checking to see if they’ve found some old out-of-print paperback of my favorite author’s stuck in some corner in back. But, the constant march of technology has me conceding that we are watching a massive paradigm shift in publishing.  The iPad, Kindle, and Nook e-readers are simply making e-books too viable an alternative to physical copies.  I’ve had the iPad for over a year now (along with its iBooks and Kindle apps) and I’ve done some light leisure reading on it– enough to know it was preferable to sitting in front of a computer.  But by and large it was a PDF reader I used to save on printing costs.

This past Christmas, I was given a Kindle Touch. I loaded up the books from the iPad app, then splurged with a few extra purchases to give it a proper try and the difference was night and day.  The critical difference was the e-ink interface of the Kindle (which, for that reason, leads me to recommend avoiding the Kindle Fire).

E-ink Kindles and Nooks are ideal readers because they weigh so little and mimic the printed page so nicely– no eye strain whatsoever.

Of those four books I boasted reading last week, three were on my Kindle and the only reason the fourth wasn’t was because I’d already picked up a physical copy of it before owning a Kindle.  The e-ink difference with the Kindle has made e-books more viable even than the iPad did. The speed with which I worked my way through a trilogy– I’d no sooner finished the first book than I’d bought and downloaded the rest of them to my Kindle, all in the span of less than five minutes– sold me on the longterm viability of the medium.

But this goes up against my deeply ingrained desire to have some physical thing I own. My bookshelves (of which I have too few) and more importantly the books that go on them (of which I have far beyond my current shelving capacity) are some of the possessions that are most “me”.  My shelves can go from classics like Lord of the Rings to Star Wars tie-in novels, to the dialogues of Plato, the economic theories of Hayek, Keynes, Friedman, to the world of Hogwarts and muggles– a look at my books is like seeing me in a nutshell.  E-books turns that collection invisible, viewable only if the e-reader is switched on. That makes it a poor substitute in that respect.  Consequently, just like with music, when there’s something I really want, I will attempt to find the physical copy first (although unlike music, books cannot yet be “ripped” onto the Kindle).

I am making myself go that route more and more, though.  Testing a series? One I only halfheartedly like? That I’ll go the Kindle route. Wheel of Time? Star Wars? Those go on the bookshelves.

This is a rather circuitous blog post. From resolution to pride to e-readers to book collecting. Funny how that works.