One Year Later - My Magic Book Journal

In a couple of days, it will have been a year since I first got my Kindle. Before the Kindle, I think I had almost forgotten how much I liked to read. I don't know particularly what was preventing me from reading. I have a number of ideas, but I'm uncertain as to which ones are correct, and which ones are incorrect.

Well, when I was going to university, I had a list of necessary reading material, and a very short list of extraneous material. When I finished, I almost stopped reading altogether. At least, I stopped reading books. I was reading short online articles. But, nothing much more than that. I had a decent library of maybe a few hundred books, but I for the most part, I wasn't reading them. I suppose it wasn't long after that that I came to Korea.

Image via WikipediaI had to choose a very small selection of books that I could take with me on the airplane. I think that in total there were four, heavy books. There are bookstores in Korea, but mostly they sell expensive paperbacks (expensive to me at least, considering I was a used bookstore kind of guy). Also, I've never been a New York Times Best Seller reader, and those are the types of books that find their way into the typical bookstore in Korea. Therefore, I never did get into collecting books while here.

Now, I have about 300 some odd books on my Kindle now, and thousands of books more to choose from should that number dwindle significantly.

The first source of books I found was Gutenberg.org. Now, Gutenberg is great. You can find all kinds of classic literature from Shakespeare to Edgar Rice Burroughs. I have not exhausted their collection by any stretch of the imagination. There are still hundreds more books to be read from there.

Since late last summer, I was pointed in the direction of a webpage which has an RSS feed which plugs in nicely into MyYahoo. The blog, ireaderreview.com , gives a list of free books which is updated almost daily. It's very good. But, since then, I found on my own an even better free books list which is at www.ereaderiq.com. They both have the same books. But what makes ereaderiq better, in my opinion at least, is that all the books are shown in an image gallery with full descriptions, Amazon rating, as well as other brief pertinent information. I believe it's updated in real time. There seems to be some automated process going on. It's a great webpage and it also has a feed which appears on MyYahoo. As far as I can tell, it has every book that ireaderreview has.

Finally, there's the subscription model. There are a number of magazines, periodicals, and newspapers, and this number is growing, many of which can be purchased for a fairly low price. I am currently subscribed to two: Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov's Science. Both are excellent publications, with my current preference being for the former, but Asimov's got a lot more material to read than the former. I plan on subscribing to a few more publications, and I am very curious about how to start a magazine service. Some of them are quite bad, but have received good reviews (see eFiction). There is nothing for poetry.

There is one area which I feel is still lacking in the world of ePublishing: graphic intensive literature. Everything from the graphic novel to books about art and even the larger format technical books are lacking. Simply put, the Kindle is incapable of supporting a good colour graphical experience. The new Kindle Fire is simply too small to offer a good experience in this venue. The fact of the matter is that graphically intense material often starts at around A4, or 11.7 x 8.3 inches or 297 x 210 mm. I do not think you can shrink that form factor of media to a tiny screen. Another thing to consider is that a part of the joy of a Kindle in the first place is the fact that it uses eInk technology. eInk is very easy on the eyes. It's even better than traditional novels. This is because in traditional print, sometimes they have to cram a lot of letters onto the page, not to mention the lines on top of each other. With my poor eyesight, that can cause a lot of eyestrain. With the Kindle, you can size it however you wish. So, that is a distinct advantage. There is also the fact that eInk is a lot easier on the eyes than LCD. Because of all these reasons, I do not feel tempted by the Kindle Fire at all, and I am eagerly awaiting the introduction of the first great eInk 11.7 x 8.3 / 297 x 210 mm screen. I believe I have a long wait ahead of me. The stories about eInk and colour are at a trickle and what products there are have had poor reviews. What about next year? Time will tell. When they do have one, though, I think I could part with as much as $300 for it. Also, the market place simply isn't quite there yet. There isn't much by way of ebooks that would take advantage of such a tablet. But, build it, and they will come!

There has also been a happy side effect to all this extra reading I've been doing. I'm writing a lot more now than I have in years. Maybe I'm even doing more writing today than I have in my lifetime. What with school far behind me, a teaching gig that has a lot of hours of idleness, and a burning itch on the tips of my fingers, I've been producing more than I can ever recall. I also have the strong desire to become a writer by profession. So, these are good times.

So, there you have it. One year with the Kindle. Here's to year two!

Asimov's Magazine - November 2011

Image via WikipediaWhat can I say that hasn't been said about Isaac Asimov? Nothing at all, probably. The guy was a phenomenal writer and contributor to the genre of science fiction. Since 1977, this magazine has been publishing a lot of the finest science fiction in short form for 34 years.

On Amazon's site, there is a subscription service which costs $2.99 for a monthly magazine. There are a number of stories in the ebook totalling about 95,373 words, plus four poems, an editorial, three articles including one from scifi legend Robert Silverberg, and a book review. This puts it on par with a 300 page novel. While there are a number of novels on Amazon and Gutenberg.org for free or significantly reduced prices, Azimov's stories were written by skilled authors and edited by skilled editors. Thus far, the only real competition to this magazine that I have read would be Fantasy and Science Fiction. That magazine is a bimonthly for $.99 for, if I remember correctly, roughly 60k words. Thus, the two magazines seem to be on-par with each other when using a strict words vs. cost comparison. It is likely that my thoughts about Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine will weigh heavily in my mind as I analyze the value of this current edition of Asimov's magazine.

Before writing these initial thoughts about the November 2011 issue, I actually read the first novella and a substantial fraction of the following. Thus far, I am not disappointed with this side of the equation in determining the value of the subscription. I will go into details later. In fact, due to the length of this magazine, I have determined to critique each novella and novelette separately, and the short fiction together with the poems and articles.

Other initial thoughts are that the formatting of this book is very easy to navigate. Controls are clear and intuitive. The table of contents are very clear and easy to navigate and use. The job the designers did on this is excellent and, I think, equal to what Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine did.

One critique I have that is common for all eMagazines thus far is that they seem to review hard cover books exclusively rather than ebooks. I'm reading an eMagazine, not a paper magazine. It ought to reflect that the audience is interested in ebooks rather than paperback books. After all, if we were interested in the paper version, would we not have a physical subscription?

Also, I would not mind seeing a bit of science with the science fiction. I know it's not a science journal. But, surely, they could add an essay section to the online version without too much trouble. There are no constraints in length (practically speaking). I think speculative essays would add a very nice dimension to the magazine.

I do not really like how Kindle magazines cannot be organized by putting back issues into collections. The magazines are immobile from the general titles navigation. This is a problem I have with all the different magazine subscriptions thus far. That said, despite the limitations, I do not regret ordering an eSubscription, and I will likely keep it active for a long time. There are positives that are obvious, but I feel compelled to outline: I'm in Korea, mailing to here is very expensive. I can take the collection on a plane without worrying about adding weight. I do feel that the benefits of eBooks and eMagazines outweigh the drawbacks.

How to Draw Anime For Beginner, Le Trung

How to Draw Anime For Beginner by Le Trung is a basic drawing book that helps aspiring anime artists accumulate some basic skills which will help them achieve some skills. It is available at Amazon.com for Kindle and a physical soft cover copy.

I'm not sure I would recommend this book for the regular Kindle, since the images will be too small to be really helpful. The textual descriptions are somewhat spartan. The translator may have done well in translating the book, but it should have had a proofreader with some skill go over the text to correct for grammar, spelling, and other minor errors that plague the book. Amazon's rating system gives the book three out of five stars.

I cannot compare this book to others like it yet, since it is the first book on drawing anime that I have read. However, I can say that it has dramatically improved what was, before this book, a neglected style of art. Now, I can safely say that I can draw anime characters reasonably well. However, I find that my awareness of historical fashion would well aid my art in this respect.

Image via WikipediaLe Trung's art in the book is very simple. I don't know if this is the limit of his ability, or simply keeping things simple for the very beginner. It took me about three weeks to go through the book. At times, I felt that he used too many pages to get across some points, which may artificially elevate the price by increasing the number of pages in the book. To be quite frank, I don't think it's worth $20 for the hard copy, nor $10 for the ecopy. Perhaps it may be worth half the asking price.

I will be reviewing and studying from several more anime books in the coming months.The images following were composed by me over the three weeks it took me to go through the book.

Basic geometric shapes to start

This basic geometric exercise is something I see often enough in a variety of different drawing books. The point is, I think, to help me see things in three dimensions instead of two dimensions. Like a basic computer twenty years ago was only capable of very primitive 3D representation, so too is my ability limited.

This is not the first time I've done this exercise. In fact, I did quite a number of these when I first started taking sketching and art a bit seriously.

Basic Anime faces

This is the basic anime face: large eyes, tiny mouth and nose, and great big reflective ovals in the eyes. It took me several hours to start to get the basic oval shape of the face and still somewhat plagues me. However, this was the first anime head that I was somewhat pleased with.

Catgirl

Girl in Kimono

 Catgirls and elfgirls apparently are fairly common creatures within the anime canon. I was kind of pleased with this effort.

Finally, to the left, a girl in kimono. I think these are the ones I will take to most as my skills progress.

However much I love anime, I have to say that traditional watercolours of the Orient turn me on more. Simplicity, elegance, calming colour harmony, are all astonishingly beautiful.