E-books - Why not?

I think it's not new information to the readers of my blog that I have always loved books ever since I was so high. Quite a few times I have read books on the screen also. But whenever it came to buying e-books, I would also look for free versions to download. And while there is a huge number of free (legally) books available on the net to download and read, I don't always get the ones I want. (Thankfully, I have all the Robert Heinlein once now, courtesy of a friend.)

But yesterday I had an epiphany. I thought, "Why am I being so stupid?" Here's how I reasoned:

* When I need a book, I do search on Amazon.co.uk and buy a copy. It costs me money and I get a paper book.
* But an e-book is still a real book. As an IT professional, I should be very much in sync with that fact.
* The e-book is usually a couple of quid cheaper than the print version.
* Now that I have a tablet I can read the e-book using Kindle for Android easily, in a booksize page format.
* I can read the same book on my phone, or tablet, or the laptop, without losing my bookmark even if I switched between books.
* It gives me almost 100% access to the book without having to carry it. ("Almost" I still can't read in the shower.)
* With the huge 48GB storage on my tablet, (16GB on my phone) I can carry literally thousands of books. No more need to select which book to carry in my bag for that particular journey.
* with the 7 hour battery life on my tablet, I can even pack only my tablet for the journey to India, reducing the weight and need for space that books occupy. Yes, I pack about 4-5 books when I travel to India, for the airport, for the flight and to read while I am there as well.
* Since I'd have more choice and more access, it'd probably motivate me to read more.
* If I read more, maybe I will be more smart and intelligenter!
* I have always been able to read on a screen, even on a small 2 inch mobile screen! So, working with a 4.3" phone screen or 7" table screen would be so much easier!
* I am running out, no, I HAVE run out, of bookshelf space in my room.Even my window-sill has books resting on it. Don't even talk about my nightstand!
* But I have loads of digital space and I can buy more without filling up my room.
* I wouldn't have to part with my e-books because I moved a different country! Still one of my big regrets is that I can't bring all my books from my room in India to here. Airline baggage limits and space limitations in my room.
* Digital books will last longer than paper books.
* Although not usually a problem with me, but when you read a digital book, your fellow-passengers cannot see the title page.

So, as I say...why not?

How much can you read in a lifetime?

Well, I haven't done this, EVER, in a bookstore but I do think that bookstores remind us of our mortality in a more painful way than graveyards or crematoriums. There are so many books around in so many different categories and so many languages. And every time I go to a bookstore I think about how many of those books I'd like to read and how there's never going to be time enough to read all the books that I want to read.


Somehow that overpowering, overwhelming feeling doesn't come when you visit www.amazon.co.uk even when you follow link after link. I don't know why. Do you?

Watch the video and make sure never to do that yourself.

I hate Dean Martin!

Pipe down! It's not about Dean Martin, it's about my favorite novel series - Matt Helm!

For an introduction you can go here - http://www.matthelmbooks.com/intro.html
but I am going to do it here anyway.

Matthew Helm, code name Eric, is an agent, a secret agent, something of the kind that James Bond is but more hardened, more down to earth quite practical. His task more often than not is to kill people. Yes, you heard me right, he kills people - people like enemy agents, or U.S. agents who have joined hands with the enemy or any conspirators, bad guys...anyone that his boss says to "remove". His is not to ask.

Funny thing is even though Donald Hamilton, the author, emphasizes the point of portraying Matt Helm as a mindless or rather opinion-less killer, in the books he is not just a callous murderer. He is also a philosopher the way we analyzes and theorizes about things without seeming to, he's also a detective as he tries to figure things out during his missions, he is quite human in the way he feels about people and things, yet quite professional in his work. It is not often that he goes against the orders even if they go against his feelings or opinion.

The narration of the books is always in the first person which makes it easier to identify with this superhero. Speed of the story is always such that it keeps you turning pages.

Matt's boss, a man known only as Mac, is shown to be an older gent, quite ruthless in his approach towards his work, and a human calculating machine in Matt's words, but that makes the little rare, human things that he does, stand out more and lend a unique touch to the situation.

The agency Matt works for remains anonymous, throughout the 27 books of the series (no, I haven't read all of them, some of them are hard to find, but I am on my way to do that), but the agency has been named variously as titles of several of the novels e.g. "The Silencers", "The Removers", "Murderer's Row", "The Wrecking Crew" etc.

More than once I have wished while reading a Matt Helm novel, that they had made it into a movie. 4 of the books were made into movies, but not properly. They just borrowed the names, the plots were completely out of line from the originals and just taken a point or two here and there. Actually, there was no plot at all. I saw that after I bought the DVD set and watched them. It was a few years later though, that I learnt that the movies were made as a spoof on James Bond movies. As such they disgrace both James Bond and Matt Helm. The movies are good for nothing more than cheesecake, they are full of beautiful girls but otherwise completely useless.
I hate Irvin Allen for producing these stupid bunch of movies and I hate Dean Martin for mocking my favorite secret agent Matt Helm.

If I had money and knowledge of the field, I would make these books into movies myself, so much I love them. The plots are quite good and the story laid out in enough detail that you won't have to work too hard to produce a screenplay. Well, according to Wikipedia DreamWorks has a project underway to make the Matt Helm books into movies but no release information is available for that. Well, hopefully they'll do it properly this time and hopefully very soon.

More books for me

Last night just before going to bed, I decided I need some more books. Well, that's always true all of the time, at least in my life. No matter how many books I have I want more books. That's one of the shortcomings of not settling down in one country that I can't build a personal library. But this time it's different I "need" more books. Having just recently finished Asimov's crappy story collection "I, Robot" I have nothing to read that I would want to pick up just for the sake of reading rather than as a necessity on the way to the crapper.

So, having the vast resources of the internet at my disposal I searched ebay for A. A. Fair. That being the famous pen name of E. S. Gardner. More people know him as Gardner because he wrote the famous Perry Mason series under that name. But he wrote another series "Cool & Lam" as A. A. Fair. Quite a small series and very rare to find those books. They were so hard to find, in fact, that I bought even the ones that were in such bad shape that they were missing last few pages. But I still bought them and read them.

It's a nice little setting of a young, very charming and inherently good boy, private detective Donald Lam, in partnership with a cool-minded, heavyset, aggressive woman Bertha Cool. They get cases and he solves them with his brilliant, brainy yet unorthodox and highly dangerous approach while Bertha mostly takes care of the business end of the ..er..business.

So, ebay being what it is, I found not one or two but about 15 of these rare beauties and immediately bought the ones I could. Read or unread alike. Glad to see they include the ones I had read but did not have the last pages for (in one case, half the book was missing :) ). So, that's my Christmas present to myself. Other than the flying alarm clock, of course. And the locklite keyhole light. Those are necessities. ;-)