Everything Is Cyclic

How do you pick up a blog after so many long pauses and breaks along the way? I don’t have an answer. I think when future generations looks back at the end of 2019 through the end of 2021, I’m sure a lot will be made of what the forced seclusion did to us as a culture and a world. I wish I could claim the gaps on this blog are a result of The Long Silence of the Soft Apocalypse.

They aren’t.

My absences on the blog are, sadly, a direct reflection of my lack of creative writing. Corona certainly fueled the absence, but it was a hiatus already in the making. Somewhere along the line, I lost confidence and faith in my writing. I look back at the books I’ve written, both published, drafted, and unfinished, and I marvel. How did I write so much back then? How did I feel so confident in what I was putting down that I then published it myself? I think back to that energetic thrill I had writing the two books I ultimately did publish and wonder how I accomplished that.

Two weeks ago I had a birthday. Birthdays are funny times, especially as we get older. They become more reflective, more retrospective. This year, I started thinking about me and writing, as I am wont to do.

I’ve never fully believed that if I were successful, I could live off writing (although I also cannot lie, the daydream is alive). Somewhere along the line, I still managed to confuse success in writing with liberation from having a day job. I know, that’s pretty silly of me, and flies against the reality of the vast majority of writers. But in seeing no path from writing to “freedom,” I lost faith in both writing and myself.

Sadly, I’ve been here before. Like so many things, it’s one of many cycles I replay (weight loss is another popular one). But the things about cycles is that they are both predictable (my next step will involve dusting myself off and trying again), and breakable. This time I feel like I’ve learned from some of the mistakes of my past.

I can only allow myself to create new. Too many times I’ve revisited old attempts at works, miring myself in past writing and thoughts. No more. No more reinventing, no more trying to salvage. Enough.

I’ve also felt like I have a lot to say on my blog. However, I’ve noticed in the past that there is a direct correlation between blogging and writing in general. There is a realtionship there, something in the wiring of the brain where words are generated and strung together.

Of course, now that I’ve revealed that secret, you all know how to tell when I’m writing. The more this blog is updated, the more I’m writing. I don’t think I can maintain daily – or even weekly, necessarily – updates. I’ve tried that before and it didn’t end well.

So, let’s see where this goes. Because at the end of the day, I really do miss creating fiction.

(As a side note, I’m writing this entry in Ulysses as a test run. It’s….interesting. Of course initial setup triggered a rate limit when it tried to authenticate, but after that it’s been fine.)

Of Kobos and Kindles, a comparison

Over the last year I have come into possession of both the current Kobo Forma and Kindle Oasis models. If you are considering purchasing either, here are some notes I’ve made you might find useful.

Technical Details

Let me start by saying both devices are beautiful pieces of tech. When the Forma first arrived, it was the first time I had held a Kobo, and was awestruck by its smooth surface and huge screen. At 8″ of screen, it is certainly larger than the Oasis’ 7″, and you can definitely feel that 1″ difference. Both models excel in doing away with what feels like lost screen space that lower-tier models have – there is no thick border around the screen. Instead, your viewing space is almost the full size of the unit itself.

The Oasis has come a long way since the first generation Oasis with removable battery pack. It’s thinner and lighter than the first-generation model I was familiar with, and feels lighter in the hand than it’s Kobo counterpart. That is probably due more to center of gravity than physical properties – I doubt I am sensitive enough to note the 10g difference in weights. Or maybe I can.

I will save you some time on Reddit and similar mobile device forums, though. Kindles tend to have no out of the box issues. While I’m sure there are defective units, they are not the norm. Kobo’s are not so blessed. The Forma in particular is notorious for having either a bad dot on the screen (is it still a pixel on e-ink?) or a band on one side of the screen that is always….off. Not broken, just off color. I was fortunate with mine, I didn’t have any bad spots, and the bar on the side, though visible, isn’t distracting. But that brings us to the next topic…

Support

Amazon is a beast. At times, it is a nasty, evil beast, obviously bent on world domination one prime delivery at a time. But being a beast, they can afford to have a responsive support system. If you have a problem with your Kindle, you can call or chat and talk to someone just about any time of the day, any day of the year. Sure, the first tier folks are largely reading off a script, but you can at least get some basic interaction going right away.

With Kobo, there is a weird, small business mindset going on. From the limited interactions I’ve had and read about from others, in North America everything goes through the home office in Canada, which is only available during East Coast business hours. And even when you are successful at getting a hold of someone, the chances of a resolution are minimal. While the Kobo devices, and the Forma in my experience, are great with lots of wonderful features, they are very much a purchase that once you have it, it’s your problem. Even if that problem is with a faulty device, from what I’ve heard.

The Store, or, networking at all

You wouldn’t think this would be a bone needing picked, but it is important to note there is a difference in the stores for the two devices. And it’s not the fact they carry different contents. We all know by now that Amazon, with its Unlimited and internal publishing support for indie authors, has a huge library of books you can’t get elsewhere. This isn’t about that.

Amazon, as I have mentioned, is a beast. They are so big, and have grown so far past just being a book seller, that they actually have excess compute power that they started selling on the side. That became its own business concern, aka, AWS.

Kobo, not so much, and this is actually where I started to have a bone to pick. In the last six months, specifically in the last three months, the store has become unreliable and in turn exposed an infrastructure flaw in Kobo. Because when the store is down, it doesn’t just affect your ability to buy books. It’s obvious that either something on their edge is having issues, or they run all of their api’s through the same set of servers for both the store and the devices, because when the store is down you lose networking. You can’t access anything online, not just the store, until service is restored. And since we can only assume they have no overnight support based on how long the outages go on without any acknowledgement, that means your device is equivalently in local airplane mode until the store is back.

Ouch.

Which brings me to stability

My first Kindle was bought second hand in August of 2008 (thanks Gary H!). In all the years I owned Kindles, I never had to muck with them.

The Forma I’ve owned for six months I’ve had to factory reset twice now, losing all of the locally generated stats (because nothing is in the cloud except your network access). I suspect it’s the reliance on SQLite for a datastore on a device that is both open and frequently mucked with (Calibre is the defacto management tool for the device). Either way, something under the hood is easily corrupted, forcing a reset to start fresh.

What about battery life?

This is a place I think the Kobo shines. The Kindle is always on unless you put it in airplane mode. Newer kindles come with blutooth, which means even more drain on the battery.

Although a little clunky at times, the Kobo runs with all network devices turned off except when in use. It can mean a delay when you try to do something and it needs to connect to your wifi, but the trade off is the battery lasts a lot longer. The Kobo also has you set a schedule for what time of day you want it to do a synch, and that’s the only time it tries to do a full synch unless you manually start one. Very nice.

Sideloading and Uploading

Let’s talk briefly about getting books on the device without the store. Both devices support sideloading, aka, plugging the device into your computer and copying books onto it locally. Traditional sideloading means the book is only available on the local device, and not, say, a reader installed on your phone.

Kindle does go one step further, though, and offers email uploading of documents. Documents sent to kindle (and here, document is a loose term – pdf, mobi, etc.) are then part of your account and available on all devices. Including, I should point out, the reading position in the document. When I was using the Kobo, that was something I found myself missing immensely.

Ads

This is even briefer. Kobo doesn’t shove ads down your throat. The device is ad free without extra fees. Amazon calls the ad experience a way to lessen the price, but reality is the base unit comes with ads and you need to pay extra to remove them. It is all about perspective, I know, but still.

Perks not mentioned yet

I’ve mentioned some of the perks the Kindle has. The addition I would add to the above is the ability (at time of purchase) to have 3G enabled. My experience is that the 3G isn’t good enough to download some of the larger books I buy, but is great for keeping the reader in sync on the road. I thought with the pandemic that I wouldn’t need this feature as much. Then one of our kids started going in for testing for Celiac’s (confirmed) and other related problems and I had to sit in parking garages a lot. 3G let’s me switch from phone to device and back again without losing my place. This is a feature the Kobo simply doesn’t offer.

But I don’t want to give the impression the Forma is a bad device. It’s not, and there are a lot of great perks on the Forma that the Oasis (and Kindles in general) are sorely lacking.

Because Kobo uses epub formats, they can easily display (and do by default) how many page turns in both the current chapter and the current book in real time. This sounds spurious, but anyone who has tried to get through a book that was restricted to Amazon’s largely useless “location” markers will see the beauty of this right off the bat.

Kobo also comes with native Pocket integration, letting your read any article in your account. I emphasize article there because what’s available is dependent on what Pocket’s algorithms classify as an article. Not everything you save to Pocket is an article, and that means they don’t show up. Also, while you can read all of your articles on the Kobo, you should be aware that it is presented as just one long list, screen after screen, of articles in the order they were saved. Filtering and organization is not for the Kobo.

The Forma in particular also comes with Dropbox support. I’ve tried it, it works, but you should not go into this thinking you can just hook up your Calibre library to Dropbox and be done with it. Calibre stores a lot more than the epub (or kepub) file and uses a hierarchical directory structure. Navigating that in e-ink is painful for a voluminous library of ebooks. It’s actually easier to just copy the book manually to Dropbox once compiled.

A silly feature I’ve also enjoyed is that the Kobo lets you set the lock screen to the cover of your current reading material. Unfortunately, with a magnetic lock cover, I only catch a glimpse when I open the cover before the device unlocks, but still, it gives the extra ambiance of dealing with a book than Amazon’s stock screensavers.

Over on the Kindle side, we have the usual integrations with other Amazon properties, namely you have access to your Audible books from the Kindle, as well as being able to update your Goodreads profile directly as you read a book.

What about Library Support?

One of the big draws of the Kobo is that it links directly with Overdrive. There’s no need to use an app like Libby, or go to your Library’s web site. Plugin your Overdrive information and off you go. You can place holds from the device, browse the catalog (really, the store, but Library options are displayed on books that are available in your system), and read library books without ever logging into another device. When a hold is available, it automatically shows up in your available books. When it works, it works great.

Kindles, on the other hand, will require you to use another device. It’s not that it’s onerous, at least not in the US (other countries, I’ve heard, do not have these options) – if you use Libby on your phone, for instance, you can click to get your book from Amazon and it will redirect you the book page on Amazon. Select your device and complete the transaction. The book will appear on your Kindle in moments.

Recommendations?

I would recommend either, but it depends on your needs. And sometimes, I’ve learned, it’s hard to know what those needs are until faced with them.

Get a Kindle – if you’re looking for a well-supported device, don’t mind that it comes from Amazon with all of that baggage, get the Kindle. If you can splurge for the 3G addition, despite the limitations on file sizes it can download, I still find it super handy. The Kindle is also the only choice if you want to be able to load your own books and read them seamlessly on multiple devices with them staying in synch.

Get a Kobo – if you’re looking to break from Amazon and want a mature device, get the Kobo. The features of the Kobo are all geared towards the reader. But be aware, the Kobo is a standalone experience by and large. If you need to be able to pick up where you left off on any device, you will only be able to do that with books purchased in the store. Everything else is local only. The Kobo is the hacker’s dream device. There were posts this week of someone getting Xwindows running natively on the device. You don’t need to jailbreak the device to hack on it, because it comes to you ready to be played with.

Both let you buy the latest book releases. If gift cards are important, it is pertinent to point out that in the US only Wal-Mart has distribution rights for gift cards (purchased online in $50 max increments). Amazon, however, is always happy to take your investments.

That was quite a post

I’m sure there’s more I could say about both devices, but then this post will never be published as I continuously tweak and edit. I know they are both the high-end models- like I said, circumstances let me be able to make this comparison. If there’s anything I didn’t touch on, feel free to hit me up in the comments. Even as I review what I’ve written, I see rumors about features in an upcoming(?) Forma 2 that includes audiobook support. Just showing you can never get ahead of the ball until you learn to accept what you have now.

H is for both Hiatus and Halting this theme

Like so many blogs, a post at the start of the new year? Who would have expected that plot twist???

Everyone.

It’s been a while, I know, a frequent refrain on this blog. 2020, as it turned, was not the year I returned to blogging, or writing of any kind, really. I finished a few rough draft manuscripts – smoldering excrements not worth the pixels I used to form them, to be honest. I have nothing to blame, nothing to point at as the root cause (not politics, not the pandemic, honest). I just couldn’t find the headspace necessary to create. Regurgitate, sure, attempt to revitalize dead manuscripts, yep, but create whole from new cloth? Miserable failures only need apply.

2021 has made me no promises, and that’s to be expected.

Realizing my writing was sinking, I turned my attention to something else for a while last year, though still intimately related – reading. In fact, although I started the year with a book challenge goal of 35 books, I later revised it to 52, and even that didn’t account for the 67 books I actually read. They weren’t all doorstoppers, but still, wow.

I’m not entirely clear what the future of this blog is (or my writing in general). Neither is something I am ready to give up on, but both have suffered from extended absences. I know I have a blog post I intend to write soon comparing Kobo and Kindle e-readers because it’s something I’ve wrestled with of late. I also have some thoughts on minimalism – digital and otherwise – that I might jot down.

Looking ahead to 2021 – well, if 2020 taught us anything, trying to look a head is a fool’s errand. I started 2020 with all kinds of hopes. Reality was firm and a bit harsh in resetting that perspective for me. But I can talk about what I would like to see happen in 2021. Namely:

  • More writing, particularly of fiction. I have really floundered the last year, and I find myself falling into old traps far too often. I’ll start a new piece, only to decide that it would work better as part of my failed fantasy milieu (and it rarely does), and then both sets of work are spoiled and trashed. I’d really like to stop doing that this year. I miss the joy of creating, the thrill of documenting the scenes unfolding in my head.
  • I wouldn’t mind more writing, of the nonfiction/blogging sort. I have this space, I should use it better. I occasionally even have things to say that people might find interesting.
  • A vacation. Of some kind. Please. My wife (and I) haven’t had a real break in a long, long time. Possibly close to a decade or so, and never one where we didn’t have to worry about the kids. Well, the kids are all teens/adults now and don’t need us to pamper and watch over them all the time, so maybe we could get a little break where we can just relax? Complicated, of course, by the still raging pandemic.
  • In 2019, I made some great progress at weight loss. 2020 did not see me reverse that, but I also haven’t made any further progress. This isn’t as easy as nonobese people think it is (there, I said it). It isn’t just a matter of willpower or doing more of X and less of Y. I recognize my responsibility in it and would like to re-engage that part of my psyche that got me this far in 2019.
  • Reading. I surprised even myself by how many books I read in 2020. Yes, some were graphic novels. One was technically a short “children’s” book (though as a side note, I highly recommend reading The Little Prince to everyone. Wow. What a book.), but that is still 28,481 pages read last year. This year I would love to read at least 52 books again if I can – but only if I can. I’m more interested in reading good stories than in the number of stories read.

I had not intended this post to read like a New Year’s resolution, although it has that feel. That’s also probably a good place for me to stop this post and leave room for another. I think this year I might try a mix of my longer posts (like the Kobo/Kindle post), as well as some one offs that are little more than tweets that were too long for twitter.

Until next time!