Tag: reading

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This year I decided to no longer spend any money with Amazon. Over the years I’ve spent quite a bit at Amazon on mostly e-books, and some paper books.
I’m exploring other options of buying and acquiring ebooks. Today I decided to divert some of the money I would otherwise have spent at Amazon as donations to Standard Ebooks.

Standard Ebooks is a US based ‘low profit‘ organisation that creates ebooks from books that are (considered to be) in the public domain in the USA, and releases those ebooks into the public domain themselves.
It ensures works are available as ebook, also when there’s no commercial entity willing to market an ebook version.

Creativity builds on creativity, creators mutually influence each other across borders and across time. The public domain is a key societal boon. In my voluntary work for the Open Nederland association, the focus is on facilitating the use of Creative Commons licenses for makers in the Netherlands. Creative Commons allows you to set generic permissions for various types of use, thus allowing creative works to flow more easily, both to the public and to other makers.

Making public domain ebooks from public domain books is a similar act. It ensures that human creativity available in the public domain keeps growing, despite various publishing houses actively campaigning against it (or even aiming to limit library access to works).

Much better to spend money there than at Amazon.
I’m diverting about 25% of my previous Amazon spending to Standard Ebooks.

There are various kinds of RSS feeds that I can access as a patron, as well as an OPDS feed for their entire collection. Such an OPDS feed, like with podcasts, allows one to distribute books and book collections as feed payload. My Calibre library tool (as server) and various e-readers (as client) can work with such feeds.

There is one caveat: whether something is in or out of copyright, depends on your location as you download a work. Works can be in the public domain in e.g. the US, where Standard Ebooks is located, but still in copyright elsewhere and vice versa. Your location determines if you are breaching copyright when downloading a work.

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I’m trying to move away from buying Amazon e-books. I read quite a bit, 60-100 titles per year. Most of those in the past years have been e-books from Amazon (some 1000 titles in my Amazon collection). Ideally I want my spending at Amazon to end, because Amazon.

The question is, what are alternatives?
And how much friction will changing things introduce in both acquiring and reading books?

Like in any silo, inside it things are frictionless, and there is a hurdle to leaving. The hurdle here is to a large extend the sum of Amazon’s practices towards publishers plus how book publishing and selling are organised globally and the resulting lack of viable alternatives.

There is very little generic e-book publishing (meaning you’d own the title outright). Amazon ties it to Kindle, the two major book selling sites in the Netherlands each tie it to a different DRM-infested channel (Kobo/Rakuten and Adobe respectively). You’re licensing a copy, rather than owning it as they can withdraw access at any time. It also means if they go out of business or leave your local market you’re locked out of your purchases.
For most e-books you are tied to specific apps or devices with their specific stores. There is no meaningful separation between the medium file and the reading device, they are mostly a package deal.

Another Amazon lock-in effect results from price. I check all books with other vendors before buying. They practically never (as in maybe once in a year of reading) beat Amazon’s pricing. For paper books this holds too, as the Netherlands uses a fixed book sales price. This effect is specifically aimed for by Amazon.

Finally, Amazon often is the only source available to me for an e-book, especially when it comes to English language science fiction.

So the preferred conditions are:

  • e-books over paper books
  • no DRM for e-books
  • directly from author or publisher
  • wide ranges of books in multiple languages available
  • not needing several reading devices
  • from an independent bookstore (paper)

Over the years I have bought e-books directly from authors (like Cory Doctorow who wrote the posting about Amazon’s practices I linked to above), and independent publishers (like Verso in the UK, for which I currently have a subscription), both e-books and paper books. I prefer e-books, especially for fiction, as I read fiction every evening in bed. An e-book reader comes with its own light and is easy to hold while lying on my side.

Non-fiction I’m more ok with paper, although I enjoy immediate digital annotation in e-books too.
Not many authors provide direct sales through their site, let alone e-books, and the same is true for publishers.
I do frequent independent book stores regularly/mostly (both online and in physical stores), but that of course is for paper books.

For e-books there’s no DRM free route it seems, so it boils down to picking a different Dutch/European silo next to Amazon. This reduces part of my Amazon lock-in and spending, but leaves wide swathes of English publications unavailable to me if I would move silos entirely.
I can afford to escape Amazon’s price lock in, although it would probably double the cost or threefold of my reading for titles I buy, as I’ve regularly used the steep reductions Amazon uses to under 5USD. The local library is of no use for non-Dutch books, e- nor paper. I did get myself a university library subscription allowing easier access to paper academic books, and electronic journals, both categories outside of what I use Amazon for.

Next to moving sideways into a more local silo for e-books, an additional step I think is weaning myself from the instant gratification of buying an e-book. Coming across an inviting title, and immediately grabbing it on Amazon to add to the pile of books to be read is how it usually goes. Likely better to allow myself time to search the best route to get them. For non-fiction I have notes about books I think are interesting, but haven’t acquired yet. For fiction I until now merely do that for titles that have been announced but haven’t been published yet. Keeping a list may help reduce my Amazon spending.

In summary:

  • Start reading within the Dutch Kobo/Rakuten silo.
  • Keep a list of titles I’d like to acquire and explore at later moment the best way to doing that.

I’ve bought 7 titles this January through Amazon (16 last December). Let’s set myself a challenge of keeping that number from rising!

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I am currently reading Wayfinding by Michael Bond. I picked up a paper version of the book in a Utrecht bookstore two months ago, while browsing book shelves.

So far I find it fascinating, and I’ve been annotating quite a bit. For the next stage of working through those annotations I realised I might want to also buy the e-book version, so I can digitally connect source text and annotations together, lift out quotes etc.

Do you at times use the paper and e-version of the same book in parallel?

For this book I enjoy being able to easily inspect the structure and main topics, using the paper book. But lifting out the smaller parts that speak to me would be more easily done from the e-book.

Or perhaps I should do all that first by hand as I do normally, and only then start down the exploratory path I feel brewing behind what I’m reading and thinking. I’m not entirely sure what I’m after here, the ability to switch easier from analog to digital, to actually combine the prime affordances of both? Or is it seeking faster gratification from exploring notes, rather than first work through the source material?

The cost of course doubles more or less if you do this. So likely it only applies to books that trigger a more intensive engagement with their contents.

Bookmarked (Re)Introducing Readlists by Jim Nielsen

This is another good example to put on my list of ‘discontinued services that deserve to be re-created’, although not necessarily as a central tool and more like a personal tool that can network. Delicious, Dopplr are others that come to mind. Also relevant because, in terms of reading, pulling together a collection of web articles on the same topic and then reading and annotating them in one go, this might be more effective in terms of learning. Might give this a try with some already saved articles on one topic or other. (found via Frank Meeuwsen)

I found myself every few weeks thinking, “gosh, I wish that service was still up. I really need to make a readlist out these handful of articles.” … I finally asked myself: “well then why don’t you recreate it?”

Jim Nielsen

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Yesterday evening, or at least my evening, we had a fun meet-up with a dozen or so Micro.blog people to talk about reading. I say my evening, because we were literally spread around the globe, with people joining from North America where it was early afternoon, Europe in the evening, and New Zealand where it was already the morning of the next calendar day. We’ve named ourselves ‘the Readers Republic’.

Some of the conversation was about making notes (or not) about the things you read. For next month’s session I think I volunteered to show my current, messy if not downright dysfunctional, workflow for processing stuff I’ve read and make notes about. That gives me a few weeks to clear that up to myself, so I’ll take it as an opportunity.

For now, I’ve added a good range of new people to the list of people I follow on Micro.blog.
Micro.blog is a micro blogging service. I have an account there, to which I connected my RSS feed, meaning anything I blog ends up there. It’s been a good source of conversation in the past 2 years or so. Those conversations now morphed into a video call with some of those involved.

In reply to a remark by Chris Aldrich

I think the point of an anti-library is not to read it all. In that sense it is not problematic that it grows faster than one can ever read. Adding something to a personal anti-library is not an expression of the intention to read it. It’s not a ‘list of books to read’. It is a preselection of things that might be interesting to read for future you. When future you is pondering a question, or exploring a topic, they can use that as filter to actually select a few books to read. Adding to the antilibrary is preselection, picking to read from it is the actual selection. For each of those 574 books you preselected Chris, do you write down why you think they’re interesting? Keeping the preselection arguments available to yourself cements its effect, aiding actual selection later. Since a year or two I jot down my motivation and associations with books as well as web articles I clip and save. It helps me a lot selecting things to read later on.

In looking at a target for how many books I’d like to read this year, I realize that I added 574 books to my list of book to read in 2021. At this rate, my anti-library is growing exponentially with respect to the books I’ve actually been able to read

Chris Aldrich