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The Kindle and I

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Last month I sold a little bit of my soul. I only went and bought a Kindle. You know, that e-reading device from wicked old Amazon. When I confessed announced it on Twitter I was braced for a bit of stick from my fellow writers. But then my first response was a cheerful thumbs-up from Erika Robuck, excellent blogger and author of Receive me Falling.

ErikaTwitter

Phew, I thought. But I barely had a minute to bask in her warm approval before the other reactions came. First, from novelist, non-fiction writer and National Academy of Writing (NAW) Director, Richard Beard:

RichardTwitter

Ew! And a while later another writing chum and NAW graduate Rob Ronsson delivered the killer verdict.

RobTwitter

Now I know you guys are only teasing but even so you got right to the heart of my conflict. But I was curious to see what the reading experience would be like and crucially whether I would want to be published on a Kindle. Call it market research.

First impressions (or What do you mean it’s not touch screen?)

When I first turned my Kindle on (after a quick battery charge) I did something that I reckon a lot of people will do. I poked and prodded the screen and then wailed, it’s not working! If, like me, you have a touchscreen phone or use Apple handheld devices then I bet your instinct will be the same. But no, there’s a Qwerty keyboard and various menu buttons to navigate around your Kindle. Even though the device is slim and lightweight, there’s a certain clunkiness about it — you have to give those buttons a firm press, for example. Overall though I rather like its lack of whizz factor. (Not least because it means my kids aren’t forever begging to have a go on it. They think it’s really uncool and can’t wait for mum to hurry up and buy an iPad.) In fact the design and feel of the Kindle reminds me of one of my other favourite gadgets, the NEO (which I rave about in this blog post).

kindlepicSo, what’s it like reading from the Kindle screen? Surprisingly pleasant. The display is sharp and free from the glare you often get on computer screens and some electronic devices. The Kindle uses something called electronic ink. The greatest bonus as a reader is that you can adjust the size of the font (and also choose from the standard range of fonts). You can make your ebook go large in an instant – no fuss.

What can you read on it?

Books from the Kindle Store, obviously. As you’d expect from Amazon the process of buying ebooks on the Kindle is (too) easy and seamless. It’s quite nice to have limited choice at the moment, although their catalogue is expanding exponentially. I can tell you that in just six weeks of owning a Kindle my first thought when buying a new book is, ‘I hope there’s a Kindle edition’ and I’m a little disappointed if there isn’t. Writers, take note. I’ve become addicted to that have-it-now convenience of buying my books. (Told you I’d sold my soul but I’m working on a suitable form of penance.)

Aside from books you can get some newspapers and magazines on the Kindle. Hmm, not sure. I prefer a printed daily paper (The Guardian, as if you couldn’t guess). Ditto magazines, but who knows – never say never.

By the way, I should point out you don’t have to have a Kindle device to shop in the Kindle store. You can download free Kindle reading apps on a range of web-enabled devices: iPads, iPhones, Windows phones, Android phones, BlackBerrys or Windows or Mac computers. If you’re interested in reading habits then have a look at this Wired article on popular ways to read an ebook.

What I’ve learned in the six weeks of owning a Kindle is that it’s a device for readers. Serious book consumers will appreciate a distraction-free reading experience. No web surfing (apart from the Kindle Store – see above) or social networking, just reading.

The question is, is it good for writers? I think it can be if the whole mess of ebook pricing is sorted out. Despite my love hate relationship with Amazon I will definitely publish on a Kindle.

Over to you. Are you a Kindle user? As a reader, what do you like and dislike? Do you read Kindle books on some other device? As a writer, would you like to publish or be published on a Kindle?  All comments welcome.

Fiona Joseph

Evernote: the next best thing to Barbara Windsor?

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Like all good control freaks I love order, and creating processes and systems. (The first time I met Excel, for example, I knew we’d be a match made in heaven.) But I must admit there are times when I’m researching on t’internet that I come across stuff that’s potentially interesting for my writing, but I don’t have a pressing need for it right there and then. So, what to do? Copy the link into a Word file or a spreadsheet? Print off the page and file a hard copy? Make it a favourite or a desktop shortcut? It seems like a big processing decision to make for something that I don’t actually want to deal with until later.

Wouldn't that be great?

I want one of those

It’s at times like this that I wish I was Barbara Windsor in the 1960s film Carry on Spying. Not for her magnificent bosom (well maybe) but because her character, Daphne Honeybutt, had another great asset: a photographic memory. With just one blink of her heavily mascara’d eyelashes she could commit huge documents to memory.

Wouldn’t it be cool if your brain could take a snapshot of your computer screen? And while I’m wishing, it would be even more fabulous if someone invented a USB cable that could download the information from our brains straight to our PC.

Hey, I’ll use Evernote instead

The inventors of Evernote must have been spying on me, because this is one of those thoughtful web-based tools that feels like it was invented just to meet my needs.

Evernote lets you ‘clip’ web pages, notes, files and images and store them in your online account, which you can create for free. You need to install Evernote on your computer and make sure the Evernote icon appears in the toolbar. Then, whenever you see something you want to save, you just clip it to Evernote. This is great as a way for writers to organise all those interesting web pages in a single place and then review their potential at a later date.

To see how it works watch this video:

Evernote is being developed all the time and there’s other whizzy stuff you can do with your smartphone. Me, I’m happy clipping pages from the web for now and pretending to be Babs.

Have you used Evernote? It’d be good to know whether or not you find it as useful as I do. Are there any alternative web tools out there? How do you keep track of your online research? Let me know.

Fiona Joseph

Writeboard: an editing tool for creative writers

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"But Mum, I really NEED that notebook."

"But Mum, I really NEED that notebook."

A couple of years ago I surprised myself by having the urge to write a poem. Yes, I actually sat down and wrote a poem! Now you might believe that poetry should be composed on sheets of handcrafted paper bound up in a leather notebook, preferably whilst sitting in a gentle breeze in the park or on a beach. (Now where’s that floaty dress?) And I was ready to buy into this writerly lifestyle, truly. I even got some real pens with different coloured inks. Then I remembered I had children. And part of the deal with kids is that you surrender all rights to ownership of beautiful stationery. Perhaps it’s a problem of boundaries (the lack of) in our household, but my offspring have a simple view of life – What’s yours is mine. End of.

Bye bye notebook, hello computer…

I’ve yet to conduct a survey on this, but my hunch is that the majority of creative writers with PCs use Microsoft Word for editing and formatting their work. It’s certainly my default option and, barring a few idiosyncrasies, it works most of the time.

But one feature where Microsoft Word falls down is when you want to keep track of multiple drafts of your writing – especially if it’s a short text (like a poem, a song, a comedy sketch, a blurb, a press release, and so on) where you could feasibly go through dozens of iterations of a single line. It’s a bit cumbersome to keep saving the file each time under a different name, i.e. myworkofgeniusV25.doc. I know that Word has the Track Changes facility but I find this difficult to use. And what about the version you wrote 10 or 20 drafts ago? Blimey, suppose the first draft was really the best version all along!

A better solution

The Writeboard is one of a number of work-based tools from the awesome Chicago-based company, 37signals. (I could sing the praises of these guys and their simple, elegant products all day long, but for now I’ll keep to the point.)

writeboard

Writeboard is an online text editor that lets you write, and then save every edit. It displays links to each edit down the right hand side of the screen so that you can easily select and compare different versions. Here’s an example, showing the deleted words and the new text.

Twinkle

There are other advantages. Because Writeboard is a web-based application, you can access and edit your file from any computer providing it has an internet connection and browser. This means less messing around with memory sticks or emailing documents to yourself so you can access them on another computer.  You don’t get quite as much by way of formatting with Writeboard, although you can certainly do bold, italics, underline, resizing headings and inserting weblinks. If you want more flexibility, simply copy and paste your best version into Word for a final polish.

The other cool thing is that Writeboard, like GoogleDocs, allows you to share work and collaborate with other people. You can each access the same document online and make changes to it. But what if you hate what your writing partner’s done to your text (like Raymond Carver did with his editor’s brutal cuts)? Again, you just roll back to the previous version.

How do I get a Writeboard?

Unlimited Writeboards are available here for free, and Writeboard is also bundled with 37signals’ online storage organiser called Backpackit, which has a free basic version, although I pay a few dollars each month because the upgrade is worth it for me.

So what cool tools or other software applications are out there for writers? Perhaps you use an alternative to Writeboard, like GoogleDocs? Let me know how you manage multiple edits and collaborations.

Fiona Joseph

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