Sunday Catch All

Ever notice how hard and crusty bread gets when it's all dried out? Hard to chew. It can even cut your gums. It's still nourishment but not a delightful way to get it. Do you think the same thing applies to dry text books in school? They contain information nourishing to the mind, but it's presented so dried out you can hardly chew it.

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Last summer when I made up my mind to publish my novel and several volumes of short stories as eBooks, it seemed that I'd better go ahead and get an eBook reader. When my Kindle arrived we became fast friends, and I even wrote about it in a few blog entries including this one with the non-ambiguous title Love My Kindle.

Well, this week I discovered at least one drawback to eBooks and the devices that you read them with. Despite the ten day battery life, they still need to be re-charged. And if you live in Minnesota, but leave your recharger cord in Florida where you spent part of your vacation, you will not be happy when your Kindle runs out of juice. I have yet to have this kind of problem with a paperback novel or magazine.

Fortunately, even though our local Target store had the re-charging cords on backorder, our local Radio Shack came through for me and -- voila! I can read again!

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Along the same lines, what are we going to do when the world as we know it comes to an end and there is no more electricity? I better hold onto my Reader's Digest Complete Do It Yourself Manual so I know how to fix things around here. The last time I replaced my toilet by watching three videos on YouTube.

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Speaking of eBooks, someone said they wanted to read some of the stories in my Unremembered Histories, but they didn't own a Kindle, Nook, iPad or Kindle Fire. I asked if she had a Chrome browser, and she said yes. Voila! She can read my books!

In fact, you can read eBooks on smart phones, too. Follow this link to a page where you can download Free Kindle Reading Apps for all your favorite devices. (O.K., not all, but a surprising number of them nevertheless.)

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The trigger for all this rambling was an item I saw at Business Insider that indicated surprise that people were using their Kindle Fire tablets more for reading books than for surfing the web. Maybe the Kindle brand is so strongly associated with books that it becomes natural to groove with it in that manner. What could be more important than reading books?

Here's a little something to serve as a closing thought on all these matters, a poem by Beverly McLoughland called Surprise.

Surprise

The biggest
Surprise
On the library shelf
is when you suddenly
Find yourself
Inside a book-
(the HIDDEN you)
You wonder how
The author knew.

Have a wonderful day in your neighborhood. Thanks for stopping by.