Once upon a time I used to hold a lot of dead trees in my hands. 

These dead trees were also known as books, or more specifically, books made out of paper, which back in the Jurassic era was the only thing you made books out of.  I mean, after all, a book is supposed to be something created out of ink and pressed wood pulp or something, right?  Isn't it supposed to be a thing that you hold in your hands, turn the pages of, and store on a shelf when you're done with it?  Aren't those the operating instructions of books?

Not any longer.  Those kind of dead tree thing are quickly becoming antiques.  Here I must confess that I used to be an confirmed bookalholic who spent considerable amounts of time and energy in book collecting, specifically the books you could find at booksales or used bookstores.  I would think nothing of driving ninety miles to a nearby city for one reason only:  to see what kind of used books I could accumulate.  I was never interested in shopping for antiques or clothes or just seeing the sights--I went straight to the used bookstores, to discover what I could add to my home library. 

The trouble was, I always needed a new fix.  There was a never-ending list of books I absolutely had to have, and it kept getting longer and longer.  I finally ended up with more than two thousand books which I stored in thirteen different bookcases.  There wasn't room for any more, but heck, I was always needing more.  There were always new things to learn, new ideas to study, new avenues to explore.  I had books in closets, book on tables, books in corners, books under the bed, books in the basement, books anywhere there was a bit of extra space. 

All of which made for endless clutter, which I hated.  And I disliked having to dust all those books, not to mention keeping them in order and otherwise taking care of them.  Even more frustrating was the fact that I hardly ever touched some of them, such as Cervantes' Don Quixote.  But I absolutely knew I had to keep a copies of the great classics around for those rare times when I needed to consult them.  The more books I collected, the more unlivable became my house.  Being a transcendentalist wannabe who had long been enamored of the idea of simple living (and who fervently believed that the less you own, the happier you are), I knew that this was wrong, wrong, wrong.  But I couldn't bear the thought of getting rid of my precious books, either. 

Well, those days are long gone.  Nowadays, instead of having piles of dead trees in every corner, I keep my texts in my computer.  I still own thousands of books, but they are electronic books, not paper.  A tree no longer has to die so that I can get a new intellectual fix.  And when I want to read anything these days, I don't go to a shelf--I simply reach for my trusty little ebook reader.

All of this improvement in my life is thanks to the way the internet has changed the book world.   Nowadays there are huge numbers of sites on the net where you can download free public domain books any time you like, and more are coming every day.  No longer do I need a copy of Don Quixote collecting dust on my shelves, along with all those other classic texts that I seldom looked at.  I can download and save public domain copies of the greatest literary works ever written any time I want, easily and quickly.  Also the price is right.

Of course, not everything that I wish to read is available on the web.  But I have also learned the joys of scanning public domain texts which I find interesting (many of which I hope to eventually upload at this site for the benefit of all and sundry).  With very few exceptions, the only books I read for pleasure these days are these kind of free books.  I have discovered that I read more slowly and carefully when I read a book in my electronic reader, and what I read resonates more deeply with me than in the bad old days when I was turning paper pages.  I have also discovered that these older books are far better written, more enduring, more interesting than the latest PC dreck on your average bestseller list.  As I have mentioned elsewhere, not a whole lot of literary excellence is being created here at the last gasp of the Piscean era.  But if you turn your attention to older texts, those from different times and places and cultures, your own way of being in the world can expand into new richness and meaning.  At the present time, I am reading the Japanese classic Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, and it is doing me a lot more good than whatever is supposed to be "hot" at the moment. 

I confess I still have two bookshelves left, but these mostly contain reference books or anthologies.  Everything else that I want to read, I read digitally.  My house is much tidier, and it feels much more like the Chinese idea of an "abode of tranquility".  I have all the intellectual stimulation I can ever possibly want or need.  My entire existence has completely changed thanks to all those miraculous little bytes and the ebook reader which displays them.

Here I must confess that it took me a while to get used to the idea of an ebook reader.  When I decided to buy one several years ago, I debated for a long time and finally decided to purchase an Ebookwise.  I bought it online so I didn't have an opportunity to see the thing in the flesh, so to speak, before I got it.  And when I first took a look at it, I was horrified.  The screen was tiny!  Only three by four and a half inches!  That was only a fraction of the size of a book page!  Was I actually supposed to read an entire book with this thing?  It was going to drive me crazy!

Well, that was then, and this is now.  I have learned to love my ebook reader so much that I never want to touch one of those wood pulp antiques again.  The Ebookwise has several features which make your reading a great pleasure.  First, it is backlit, so you can easily read the text in all kinds of light.  Next, it is practically weightless and very easy to hold in your hand.  Finally, when you want to turn a page, all you have to do is give a slight press to the page button, and presto!  You're there!  After you get used to this, you never want to go back to the nuisance of turning paper pages again. 

Having said all this, I must confess that the Ebookwise has its problems, the main one being that the only way you can easily upload your texts is with Microsoft Windows.  If you try to upload with a Mac or Linux operating system, you have to work with an antiquated Smart Memory card or go online to the Ebookwise site and work your way through several baroque maneuvers.  Since I have finally had it with Microsoft (Vista was the last straw), I can see that I will not be using the Ebookwise forever--I want to be able to load my own content onto my own reader directly from my own computer.  So I cannot recommend that you purchase an Ebookwise.  But seeing as how more and more ebook devices are becoming available every day, including cell phones with the ability to store and display texts, I'm sure I will eventually find a new reader that I will like. 

Although I'm staying as far away as I can from any new-fangled device which requires e-ink technology, such as the idiotic Sony reader.  Rumor has it that the new e-ink readers take as long as an entire second to reposition to the next page--jeepers, can anything be that slow?  Also an e-ink screen is not backlit.  You have to read an e-ink reader in strong light, or else you can't see the words.  Well, speaking as a connoisseur of luminosity, I confess that I adore all of the more poetic varieties of light, such as twilight, candle light, moonlight, starlight, iridescent light, opalescent light, misty light, but...  strong light?  Is that what I would need in my life in order to decipher an e-ink reader?  Perpetual July sunshine or a 200-watt glare?  Forget it.

There are two other blessings I have discovered from my love affair with electronic texts.  The first is that you can turn any computer text into a spoken audio book thanks to speech synthesis technologies, also known as text-to-speech (TTS).  There are lots of companies around these days that produce audio books, some of which are very good indeed.  But most people still don't realize how easy it is to turn any electronic text your possess into your own private audio book any time you like.  Here I must admit that the computerized voice doing the talking doesn't sound quite human, but after a while you get so used to it that you don't remember it's machine generated.  Nowadays I can drive to work accompanied by the spoken words of--for example--AE or George Santayana.  Nobody is ever going to make audio books out of authors like these, but who cares--I can do it myself.

The other wonderful thing about etexts is machine translation.  If you find an etext in a language you don't understand, you can simply use a machine translator to convert it into your native tongue.  Of course the electronic translation is never completely successful, but it will give you the gist of the original.  For the first time in my life I have been able to read texts written in unfamiliar languages which have never been translated into English.  I have also purchased the Systran English/French translator and have been very pleased with it.

So much for me--now for you.

One other interesting thing happened to me when I started reading ebooks:  I discovered that I didn't want to read any kind of electronic text unless everyone else on the planet could also have free and immediate access to it as well.  I can't remember feeling like this back in prehistory when I was staring at ink marks pressed into pulp, but things shifted when I started reading electronic texts.  I no longer want to control my bytes, neither those created by myself, nor those which I have obtained from someone else.  I want to share them with as many people as I can.  Up to and including the texts of fairly recent out-of-print books whose authors are now dead.

Which brings me to a very infuriating issue, that of copyright.  Now I am willing to acknowledge that living authors are entitled to their royalties, but if an author has been dead for decades and his books out of print, why can't I scan and upload these kind of older texts to the net?  Well, I can't thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).  This piece of legislative lunacy is preventing thousands of out-of-print books, recordings, and silent films from being made available to the public.  Rumor has it that our congressional representatives succumbed to Hollywood pressure groups when they passed this law--there are still several studios, most especially Disney, who are determined to wring a few more pennies out of their motion picture oeuvre from four or five generations ago.  Imagine that:  our American politicians actually succumbed to pressure groups!  Can such a thing be possible here in our democracy?  Surely not, that only takes place somewhere else... right? 

What is most exasperating about the DMCA is the public domain status of out-of-print books.  The law declared that all books published prior to January 1, 1923 would be in the public domain and could be made available on the net.  But we now have to wait until the year 2018 for books published in 1923 to enter the public domain.  And another year after that for books published in 1924.  This is nothing short of outrageous.  Wikipedia's 1923 in Literature page shows an interesting list of creative works which a lot of people, including myself, would like to take a look at, but don't expect to see them online any time soon.  Unless you buy them or order them through interlibrary loan, you are going to have to wait another eleven years before you can upload them into your ebook reader.  There are several copyright reform movements afoot these days, but the federal government being what it is, we will probably have to wait until 2018 before any kind of change takes place.  Hurray for Hollywood!

The only thing these corporate maneuverings are going to generate from this, of course, is ever-increasing loathing.  Fortunately, in the Aquarian world which is forming around us every day, people are going to be outraged not by stealing information, but by all dim-witted attempts to control it.  When you want everything to be free and available to everyone, you are responding to Aquarian energies.  Controlling information, keeping secrets, staying hidden... all these are Piscean manifestations which will become increasingly incomprehensible to people as the years go on.  Aquarius means freedom from any kind of authoritarian control, whether from moronic copyrights or corporate DRM.  Says Mr. Universe in Joss Whedon's movie Serenity:  "Can't stop the signal, Mal.  Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere."  Such is the voice of the Aquarian future.

At any rate, reading a paper book is about as old fashioned as using a goose quill pen these days.  If you are one of those people who is still stuck in a pre-byte time warp, it's time for you to move into the new electronic world.  Save trees--read ebooks!