Crazy, Crazy Change
The ebook world is crazy, lately. As you’ve probably heard, Kindle is embracing an entirely new format. This is a great thing: books are going to pretty much be almost as flexible as web pages, now. The possibilities are (well, I’m a writer, so I hate to use clichés, but…) endless.
But change stresses me out. I find that the first day of a change, whether it be a bug or a bad change or a good change, I can hardly eek out any work afterwards.
And then the next day?
The ever-changing ebook world is why I love it. It’s so exciting!
If it stayed the same, I’d get bored and quit.
But today? The first day? There have been so many changes lately, that I’m stressed out.
I do love it, though. 
So what? Do I now delete all my Kindle Formatting posts? I’m sorta glad I never had time to finish the series.
Do you need time to process change?
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Natasha Fondren is a writer traveling the U.S. in a camper with her four cats. She is currently enjoying the lizards and desert heat in Arizona.
This sends me into a deep, deep depression. I’m sorry, but I am so tired of change I can hardly stand it.
I’m with Charles. Are you saying the new device is going to require new formatting? Surely the old formatting has to work with it. From what you said in your series, that whole formatting thing was just way beyond me, I sure hope it hasn’t got even worse, for your sake. Hey, I do love the concept of e-books, so long as someone else is taking car of the technical side. You know, those crazy people who love change!
No, I hadn’t heard. Right when I’m 3/4 of the way through formatting our 2nd book for the Kindle. I’m sure the new readers will read the old format or Amazon will offer an automatic conversion tool, but the question is, when to start coding in the new format. There must be a tipping point where the number people with devices that read the new format will generate enough sales to ignore all those older Kindles still out there. Or where revenue from the users wanting the new format will exceed that lost from those who have old readers and can’t read your book formatted with the new rules.
I am actually very excited about this announcement. If I understand it well, it won’t be a revolution for authors (formatters), we’ll just get a new version of Kindlegen (hopefully still command-line
, previewer, firmware updates etc., like we are used to, just supporting lots of new things and possibilities. Moreover it should bring Kindle ebooks and EPUBs (at least good implemenations like ADE) closer.
Amazon promised backward compatibility and they will keep their promise, they cannot make all their 100,000s ebooks look uglier or unusable after some firmware update.
Surely almost every change brings some initial headaches, but in the end there will be more beautiful ebooks (fiction and especially non-fiction) for everyone. I am really looking forward to formatting some encyclopedia in KF8
.
Of course they couldn’t just switch to epubs, if they were going to change. :/ So now we have yet another new, proprietary format, with support for both Kindle formats for at least a while. Lovely.
This is why I buy only PDFs, and will buy only PDFs until there’s a clear winner. Until the major players stop snarling at each other, trying to prove who has a bigger dick by ramming their own favorite format down the readers’ throat, it won’t be worth it to commit to anything but PDF in my opinion. I can read PDFs on anything and don’t have to worry that this or that reader is switching to something else or going obsolete.
Angie, who wishes they’d all get their act together and agree on a damn standard
I actually ordered a Kindle Fire, and cancelled the order today. The more I thought about it, the more silly I thought it was. I just want to read on the damn thing. I have a computer for all the other stuff. I’ll wait until they do super cool things with books on the new format, and then maybe I’ll splurge. For now, it just looks like they made the Kindle into an i pad like device.
The thing that attracted me initially, when I first ordered it, was the pictures of books in the library. I sometimes forget the books in my library are about!
I think the kindle fire is aimed at kids. They’re the ones who don’t mind reading on a computer screen and it does so many more things that just read books, but I hadn’t heard that we need to format our books differently. Surely they’ll let their authors know what changes we need to make. Mind you, you can never assume.
I just put my first short work on Kindle, painstakingly formated to make it beautiful and it was a steep learning curve to do it. I don’t mind change but I hope the effort to learn HTML wasn’t wasted.
Of course like your website internet site but you want to have to check the spelling on various of your posts. A number of of them are rife with spelling problems and I uncover it actually bothersome to tell the truth having said that I’ll undoubtedly arrive again the moment once more.
Ohmigosh, I know this is spam, but I had to leave it up. I would love examples of my posts being rife with spelling problems, ROFL. O.o As I’m a copy-editor, I might need to change careers should I discover that I’m unwittingly making so many spelling errors!