| Subject: China, e-books and updates |
Author:
Wes
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Date Posted: 20:39:48 07/28/09 Tue
I've mentioned to a few people that my daughter is home from China for a month, so understandably writing isn't at the top of my priority list right now. But I thought I'd talk about a couple things involved with this.
The daughter has just finished up two years in the Peace Corps in China. For the most part it has been an interesting experience -- and more so in the fact that she met an English guy there and brought him home with her. Dan is a student of the language at Sichuan University and has got another couple years facing him there. Since the job market in this neck of the woods is lousy, the daughter has decided to head back to China with him for at least another year, where she'll study Chinese herself, do a little teaching and tutoring to pay the bills, and otherwise live the expat life -- a pretty cool adventure to my mind.
Chengdu, the city where they are located, is pretty interesting. When you think Peace Corps you think of something out in the middle of nowhere, with few creature comforts. Instead, this proves to be a very modern city of 14 million people, and interesting of itself.
I've mentioned somewhere on the web page that my daughter is a reader, and in order to feed her addiction she went to China with a laptop, with a full 35 gigs of books on it. That is one bunch, especially when you consider that a typical book is about a megabyte on the average. It probably doesn't add up to that many books since a lot of what she has is in .pdfs, which are pretty inefficent when it comes to file size, but still!
The problem with this is that a laptop is still pretty cumbersome as a reading device, especially if you're the kind of person that likes to fall asleep reading, which she is. In spite of the modernity of Chengdu, books in English are not common and she reports that the largest bookstore in the city only has a small shelf of books in English, and then quite expensive.
So, about the first thing she did when she got home was to latch onto a Sony 505 e-book reader. She really wanted a Kindle, but the features of the Kindle involving online ordering aren't available in China, so the Sony made a little more sense considering the price differential. Let's just say that I'm impressed with the Sony and may pick up one for myself some one of these days. I honestly think that we're going to be seeing e-books getting to be more and more common, and as they become more popular the price on the readers is going to go down.
I know I'm preaching to the choir on this, since if you're reading this you're already pretty used to the idea of reading e-books and online books, but I think this is the wave of the future. One of the things I plan to do pretty soon is to do the messing around needed to make Spearfish Lake Tales completed books more friendly to e-book readers. At least, I have it on my "to do sooner rather than later" list.
One of the things I will be doing while my daughter is home is giving her copies of the near-term books and going over the ins and outs of site administration with her. This means that if something should happen to me, there still will be several years worth of posts for you to read on Spearfish Lake Tales. At my age, that's only the prudent thing to do.
Also, we are talking about collaborating on a story that will be mostly set in China. We don't have a major plot worked out -- I'll probably do that, while she adds the color. I have no idea how this will come off, but I'm hoping it will. It should be interesting if we can make it work!
One other thing: the wife and I are planning on taking off for a few days traveling with the kids next week. I will be taking the laptop with me in hopes of being able to update the site, but if for some reason I can't make a connection the post that would normally be made around 9 PM EDT on Thursday, August 6 may be delayed as much as a day. I will try to remember to make a reminder announcement on the web site on the Tuesday upload, but if something gets screwed up you'll know what's happening. Don't get too worried if it doesn't get made on the normal schedule. I really hate doing it this way because I hate the idea of missing an upload. You have all been faithful readers, and I want to keep my promise of doing regular updates to you, but whether I'll be able to make it on time or not is a little out of my hands. I will do my best!
-- Wes
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