Wednesday 13 March 2002

Pic of the day: All things are connected. I told you! (Mandelbrot fractals to the rescue again.)

Synchronicity and e-books

So while I wrote yesterday’s entry - which I won’t blame you if you decided not to read - I was using Google repeatedly. I used it to find a comprehensive definition of a Japanese term rather than explain it myself. I used it to find a page in English about the fictional U.S. Marshal Morgan Kane. And finally, I used it to point you in the direction of a beautiful (but slightly boring in the long run) book which is out of print, but in e-print, thanks to Fictionwise.

All things are connected, you know. Sometimes eerily so. While searching for a brief English synopsis on Kane, I noticed a page in Norwegian declaring that Morgan Kane was ready for e-books. (At first only in Norwegian. For some obscure reason, he is a cult hit in all Nordic countries, even Iceland and Finland, but only moderately successful in England and never published in the USA as far as I know. This seems to happen to a lot of popular literature from Norway. I wonder if the cheaper distribution of e-books will change that...)

***

That’s not the point, though. The point is, I briefly stopped to read this article on a web site about Morgan Kane and e-books, and found that the site was actually about e-books in Norway generally. I also downloaded a free e-book, a final report on a studies on e-books in Norway (!) and gave it to Cassie my handheld PC for later reading. That was yesterday.

Today, I heard one of the guys who wrote that, on radio. He was declaring (with no tears) the upcoming death of most bookshops in Norway. The profit margins are so small that if even a small minority of the customers switch to e-books, the current network of small bookshops will collapse. The cities will be left with fewer shops, the towns and villages with none. What he did not say was that this will further boost electronic distribution. If you have to buy your books over the Net anyway, you are likely to choose the system that lets you read them five minutes from now rather than the system that requires you to wait a week, then get them in the mail, or more likely drive to the post office miles and miles and miles away and stand in line to get them. (Yes, that is a run-on sentence. I did it on purpose, to show just how boring it is to buy paper books. E-books rule.)

Now if there is superstition, there ought to be something called substition too. I’ll write about that another day, God willing ... Anyway, why in the name of Darwin was I reading this guy’s web site yesterday when he was on the radio today? It’s not like I have noticed him before, or had any idea that they had this project going on, much less that it was just concluded. Then suddenly less than 12 hours after I become aware of it, he’s on national radio. Hmm.

"It is coincidence! The human brain is so good at finding patterns, it even finds patterns where there are none! This has been scientifically proved!" Oooh yes, baby.

***

I didn’t mean to write about e-books yesterday. It wasn’t remotely on my mind, though I am a fanatical adherent of free e-book technology. (Such as MS Reader which comes included with MS Windows for Pocket PC, and which is also available for free for other PCs.) I have in the past recommended www.fictionwise.com in particular, for their broad selection of sci-fi and fantasy. But I had not the faintest idea that they also stocked The Silver Sun, until I made a general search for Silver Sun & Nancy Springer on Google. This is a book that I bought in print in a used-book store in Bergen while I was out traveling. I would not have done that if I knew it existed as an e-book. (Actually, the used book was quite used and so much cheaper than the e-book, for a change. But there is still the space constraint and portability issue. One zip disk can easily hold a full book shelf.)

Anyway, I didn’t mean to write about e-books. I generally didn’t. Despite this, the entry ended up with a link to an e-book. This too happened at the same time that I - on an unrelated search - happened on this web site about e-books. By the man who would talk about e-books on radio less than a day later. Come on, all together now: "It is coincidence! It is coincidence! Four legs good, two legs better! Baaah! Baaah!"

(The last there, the 4 legs thing, refers to the sheep in Orwell's Animal Farm, mindlessly repeating whatever the pigs told them. If you haven't read the book, shame on you. You don't deserve to understand this exquisite reference. Go read it now!)