Lately, I have been hearing from people who received a Kindle as a holiday gift and they are very pleased with it. The latest generation is wireless, always a good thing if you plan on reading a book at the beach. In fact, that seems to be the ideal use of a Kindle: a way to transport many possible books without having to carry them around, perfect for English teachers who utilize books without graphics or photos and where the written word is the focus.
Here is the latest amazon ad. You can see that Kindles have come down in price a great deal since they were first offered.
Over the weekend, there was a discussion on NPR about “e-books.” I responded to that feed on facebook to explain the various “e-books” there are and why there is so much confusion about them.
The word “e-book” is short for “electronic book.” In other words, the consumer needs some device by which to “read” the book.
Some people refer to “e-books” as something that can be “downloaded” to a specific computer, if a fee is paid. Those books or sometimes, short stories, do not have many graphics or photos, and usually very few pages.
An “e-book” might be offered for sale on CD, as are four of my works that used to be offered in print. There are many advantages to purchasing a disc, instead of a book. I will enumerate some of the “pluses.”
1) A disc is easily stored.
2) No one will spill coffee on the book pages.
3) No one will bend the edges of the book corners.
4) Discs can contain an extraordinary amount of information, and a great many photos (My largest e-book to date is 355 pages long and has 340 images).
5) With my e-books, the consumer who prefers to have a print version is allowed to print out a personal copy which can be coil bound at a copy shop, if desired.
6) Shipping is less costly than a comparable hard cover book, yet all of the information is retained. In fact, the book is even better! There has been no change in photo edits due to the printing process.
7) Navigation is superior, and while reading the book, Internet references cited are just a click away. One can move easily via internal links, page links, and word searches = lots of navigation.
All books print out to a page size of 8 1/2″ x 11.”
9) The only requirement to view the CD is to have either downloaded Adobe Reader (a free, easy-to-install software program) or that the program already be present (which it is, on most new computers).
Our four e-books, stored on CD discs, are listed on the front page of Quilter’s Muse Publications: Redwork Renaissance Revisited; Straight Talk About Quilt Care; Ellen Emeline (Hardy) Webster (1867-1950): Her Amazing Quilt “Charts,” Her Writings, and Her Life (New Hampshire’s Early Quilt Historian); and Redwork Embroidery and Needlework Traditions in Europe and America.
These books represent years of my life and careful study to create. They have been out-of-print until we recently formatted them into e-books, the only sensible thing to do. I thrill at making them available again. In revisiting these titles, I am aware of all of the original research that I did to make them the very special books that they are. I hope you will agree!
Have a lovely day!
Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications
