I am also one that has many hobbies. I have tried to find a balance between my love of knitting and crocheting, video games and reading. After 2 years of intense schooling (my last semester yielding me 18 units and no free time) I needed a break from reading. I won’t lie, I had spent so much time reading that the last thing I wanted to do was read for pleasure. Period.

Since getting my nook, I find myself reading much more often. Initially there was the “Oh! Shiny!” factor, but it has now become something more significant than just a new gadget for me. The almost instant on to the last thing I was reading makes it so much easier to read a few pages, or a chapter, and set it down again. No need to prop the book open. No need to find a comfortable position to rest my elbow. I hold my nook in my hand or rest it in my lap. While laying in bed it weighs exactly the same if it’s 200 pages or 800 pages. I prop up my book light as I would with a paperback, but no need to shift from side to side, or change the way I lay down to read. The inconvenience of reading an actual book in bed is no longer there.

I must say though, I will not stop buying physical books. There is nothing I love more than walking into the infinite possibility that is a bookstore. Small or large, new or used. I have been known to judge a book by its cover or by its title. I found gems and duds, but rarely do I regret a purchase because I learn something from the experience of reading a new author, an unknown author, or a well-known author I’ve never had the pleasure of reading previously. My purchase of physical books will just slow down, tremendously. Especially with the only new bookstore within 50+ miles of me closing down.

My complaints about my nook are few in number and don’t outweigh the benefits I gain. Aesthetics. I have never liked the design of the Kindle with 1/3 of the smaller (not the DX) covered by unsightly keyboard buttons. Why do I not like this, because this portion of the Kindle is not used often enough to justify the full keyboard being in view all the time. The nook eliminates this by having the capacitive touch screen which turns off and takes up a much smaller space than the Kindle’s keyboard. The Sony reader is simply too boxy for me.

The ereader in comparison to physical books became a cost benefit situation. Ebooks are discounted because of the lack of physical space they take up. There are no trees going toward the publication of the book. My bookshelves are already full. Brimming. I have boxes in storage, full of books as well. I simply cannot tote them all everywhere I go over the next however many years. The boxes weigh a ton and gawd-forbid there’s an earthquake… because my large bookshelf might topple and kill someone. For travel this also becomes an added benefit. It takes up less space than a netbook and even less space than a handful of books might. I always pack 1-3 books with me as a “just in case” measure when traveling. I don’t travel often, but 11 hour flights with 2 hour layovers are not fun with nothing to do (usually plugs in airports are taken by wayward traveler’s leaving the netbook as entertainment almost impossible for more than a couple hours, leaving the flight itself with less opportunities for distraction).

To put it more simply, I need to cut back on the amount of crap I take with me from one apartment to the next, and the need to have an entire room (or rooms) dedicated to bookshelves. I carry with me at any given time a library to pick from when I do want to read something. I can satisfy my impulsive side (by being able to buy immediately and have available for reading immediately) as well as having the added ability to choose a book based on my mood or genre choice.

However, the choices of books available in ebook format aren’t as diverse as I hoped for. I’d love to see a lot more choice available for downloading and purchasing. Tons of new stuff from a lot of authors I’ve never really been interested in… well, ever, so deciding to spend my hard earned money on a book I’ll likely never read is a simple one; I just won’t. As ebooks become more and more available the benefits start to outweigh the initial cost. The need for more publishers and authors to be on board for carrying their works in the ebook form becomes greater.

With the iPad‘s arrival onto the scene, the market has taken a turn. I suppose it depends on which side of the table you find yourself as to whether the pricing war will bother you or be just another annoyance. I have never been one to buy hardcover books in the past, so the pricing guideline change won’t affect me nearly as much as it will other avid readers. The pricing of ebooks is roughly as such:

Popular books will now be priced higher, closer to the $12-$15 mark for books that are newly in hardcover. Bestsellers may or may not be sold at a slightly lesser rate in accordance to the discount given to physical books. The price will then come down when the book has been made available in paperback. There is some evidence of this when you browse available books, either through Amazon, Sony or Barnes & Noble.

“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”

It is this exact mentality regarding publishing that causes problems surrounding pricing of ebooks. They require almost no resources to publish. The distributer is the one paying for the cost of traffic (download traffic specifically, since you purchase the book from Amazon, Sony or Barnes and Noble). Authors like Mr. Preston want you to believe that his livelihood is based solely on hardcover sales. However, why not make a book available in ebook format as well, where the revenue generated is almost entirely profit? What is the point of bad-mouthing the very people who support your endeavors? Without the American consumer, or more importantly, ANY consumer, there is no revenue to be had.

My issue is the fact that digital content should be mine regardless of the cost I’ve spent. We’ve danced the DRM dance regarding music and in the end the consumer won out, with the ability to take their purchased content to any device they choose. It costs more, sure, but not significantly more. And when the consumer does the cost/benefit check, it’s worth the extra $0.30 to be able to take their iTunes purchased content and include it on the Zune, or their cellphone.

Kassia Krozser at Booksquare.com brings up many interesting points regarding the pricing of ebooks:

You can trot out your business model and your profit-and-loss statements, but your customers don’t really care. They’ve grown accustomed to this power, and if they can’t get what they want from you, they’ll get it from someone else, Including, yes, non-legal sources if that’s the only alternative you provide. Your competition has changed, and you must change. Yep, it’s a variation on the publish or perish model.

When pirating ebooks becomes are more lucrative market for piraters, it will face the same challenges that DVD’s (as well as Blu-Ray’s) and music has faced in the past. The forums and websites will flood to the market to make available those items that people are looking for. $15 isn’t a lot for a new book, by any means, but it’s a lot of money for not having any rights to the content. Buying a physical book lends me certain privileges. I can let a friend (or 15) borrow the book (keeping the publisher from getting any profits from those people at all, truth be told). I can sell the book to a used bookstore for a store credit towards more books. I can also take my physical book anywhere I want. It seems digital content has yet to catch up to these things, though Barnes and Noble is at least trying with its LendMe feature.

Another option for authors to consider is the ability to self-publish. This might become something we see more and more, leaving publishers (the greedy bastards that they are) out of the picture entirely. One can only hope.

I guess in the end, the consumer will be able to regulate pricing based on whether or not they’re willing to pay the higher price tag. If an ebook doesn’t sell many units at the now ridiculous $15 price, publishers might find themselves discounting books after all. People will find a way to get what they want to read, and the more markets out there, the better it is for the consumer. Only time will tell.

The “other” flickr manager thing required me to do all of this high tech mySQL database conversion stuff. It was kind of terrifying. Mostly because it’s been years since I’ve done that kind of stuff, and I don’t know all the in’s and out’s of how WordPress does it’s thing. Dreamhost ends up doing all of the updates for me automatically anyway, so it’s not really me that looks all high tech and fancy. It’s them. No joke. Not me. So I ended up getting the databases all converted from latin1 to UTF-8. Sounds exciting, but now my little Flickr widget is broken. *sigh* Ah well.

So of course, I’ve been doing all of this and getting no where. Getting frustrated was inevitable, but really? I can’t just put A photo in my blog? Just one? I don’t want to have to upload the same damn photo eleventy-billion times in fourteen different places. I use Flickr almost exclusively for my photos. It’s because I can email them from my iPhone and share. It’s just easier that way. So why all this running around (on the internet) and backwards nonsense to share A single photo?

Oh well. It seems there was some kind of weird change when WordPress updated to 2.8. The author submitted  a fix for the lovely Flickr Manager plugin I already had installed, but it hadn’t been approved yet and you could download it directly. So I did. I could have saved myself a ton of headache and confusion and database backup-ing and terrified I’m going to break something to beyond fixing. Y’know how it goes.

And so here I go with the photo sharing. Because after all this nonsense I better start sharing some damn photos, right??

Here is the first attempt at Sweater Hoodie thing. It’s technically called theApres Surf Hoodie, but I like my name better. It’s easier for me to say outloud when I talk to myself while knitting/blogging. The pattern calls for you to make two halves, the back and the front, and piece them together. I started the back (which is what you see pictured here) when I found some blog posts somewhere on the internet regarding doing it in the round (I cannot for my life find the link where the girl mentioned how she did this, but if I ever do, I’ll link it!). So I frogged (took the whole thing apart, for you non-knitting/crocheting folks) and started again. And started again. And again. And again. And again. No really. I started it over 5 different times before I finally decided on starting it on DPNs (double pointed needles; usually used for making socks and other items in the round) and after a few rows transferred it to the circular. The “invisible” start cause some issues with starting ON the circular needle (aka frustration!). I’m about 2 rows away from starting the lace part (the body), which took me DAYS to do.

Side note: Because I can now work this all in Stockinette Stitch, I can continental stitch all of it, meaning that I knit 4 times faster. Having to “throw over” all of the purl rows (when going back and forth) meant I got the first 26 rows (of both the front AND back) done in less than a day and a half (of knitting in between Wintergrasps (WoW speak ftw!) this weekend). This should technically take me a whole helluva lot less time to finish. Yay!

Also to share, because I’m in a slightly obsessed phase, is some yarn I dyed. Because, like I said, I’m slightly obsessed. This one is called Tribal. It’s Brown, Teal and Orange. I used Kool-Aid and Wilton’s Cake dye. This one makes me happy and I love it.

I call this one Odyssey. No reason for the name, but it’s Kool-Aid and Wilton’s Cake dye as well. I love the colors on this one.

And thus concludes my photo sharing entry of the day.

Do you remember those days? Back when we would talk about the mundane bits we did in our lives and each day we’d spend hours upon hours reading up on each other. I’ve met my Canadian twin Joanne because when I google’d or yahoo’d “vox machina” she showed up, though really I was looking for Zannah. I started reading and BOOM that was the end of that, and her interesting life became my online obsession.

There was a shift, though, in the internet. Right at the height of the Dotcom boom something changed in the way people were blogging. It became more about sharing strange and weird things found online than it was about sharing your own life. People let their personal blogs disappear and eventually fade away into non-existence because real life came along and punched them in the face. It was the same for me too. I fell victim to the same thing.

Then everyone found their niche blogs. The one thing that they blogged about all the time, every entry. And while it’s interesting and even kind of awesome to get so much information about one (or two) subjects, it became like beating a dead horse (until dead again).

And then the death of the internet came. Okay, not really, but it seemed that way to me. Mostly because before the term “dooced” (my firing happened in January 2001) became part of the blogging world, I was fired from a job because of the things I wrote about on my blog. I didn’t mention who I worked for, or co-workers names, but I was fired for the contents of my Opendiary blog anyway. But I kept blogging like a good little would-be writer does. That is, until people in your real life, start misunderstanding bits of your online writing life. I can’t possibly be the first person to slightly (or not-so-slightly) exaggerate a story or two. And I can’t possibly be the first person to maybe just a teeny bit elaborate on the personal opinions on the decisions of other’s lives. This became the focal point of real-life friends and the online disappearance came shortly after.

Fast forward quite a few years and you find yourself in the Twitter, Plurk, Facebook status, Myspace update world of online micro-blogging. In 140 characters tell me what you’re doing because most people have gotten to the point where that’s about all they can manage to read about any given person. It doesn’t actually matter that in 140 characters you can’t ever get to the meat of something. It can’t tell the whole story. It’s like one-sided chatting with the occasional response. It’s great, for the most part, and I partake in many of the micro-blogging sites (with great fervor I might add).

Where am I going with this? Okay, so on Monday (the day that made me cry on the phone with the boyfriend like someone punched my cat in the face with the big choking sobs and body shakes and inevitable exhaustion) WendyKnits, posted a link on Plurk that led me to CrazyAuntPurl (aka Laurie). In the last 3.5 days I have read nearly everything from January 2005 until April something 2006. I still have a few more years of catch up reading to do, but holy crap! This woman not only can write, but she talks about all sorts of things going on in her life.

It’s not to trivialize anyone’s life, but it’s funny to find myself wrapped up so completely in someone else’s personal online blogging life that I’m basically like a crack addict in need of a fix. Or someone who’s had a really shitty week and needed a really good distraction. Either way, it worked.

Zannah and her sister Narilka have mentioned blogging again. I’ve logged into my admin page, clicked the “new entry” link and stared at the blank page every day for the last 3 days. I’ve talked in the past about wanting to write again. Getting back to writing some more, on either domain.

But finding Laurie and reading about her life reminded me of why I enjoyed reading people’s blogs in the first place. A glimpse into another’s life through their story telling. It doesn’t matter if it’s slightly distorted, horrifically exaggerated, or completely fabricated. It was interesting. And I loved it.

So who’s with me? No more TL;DR!

My wonderful future husband David Tennant had better not do the whole die/regenerate nonsense.

*NOTE* Possible spoilers in comments.