captlychee | Sep. 25th, 2017

Now, Constant Readers, it isn't often I post anywhere anymore. Facebook has become so easy to jot down the little pieces of ~~wisdom~~ bullshit that I come out with from time to time that I don't get enraged enough about things to mean I post about stuff that annoys me. Not that everyting I post is about stuff that annoys me, but I'm in that zone or time of life where the only thing that motivates me to do anything except Duolingo and, yes, bloody Facebook is stuff that annoys me. I suppose there are the occasional glimmers of joy when the Mighty Blues win, but that was only six times this season and, apart from a lovely and hot ten weeks in Orlando just before the hurricane ploughed through the place like a Muslim through Pulse/del>—no, that one was a little too tasteless even for me. Dreamwidth is having an effect—there haven't been that many joyful moments.

Not that it's been a misreable year. I'm my usual upbeat or mildly optimistic self, moreso now that the Eye and Ear confirmed that the eyeball is not going to collapse overnight but will stay much the same as it is now for the foreseeable (irony!) future. Plus, now that I'm back in Australia and home in beautiful Ballarat, I can iron a shirt whenever the mood takes me, which is every morning. I've also signed another lease on the house so, barring the owner suddenly selling it, I'm here for another year. So life is nice and stable.

So that is the setting for this particular rant.

There is, as you've probably realissed, little doubt that I am, for most intents and purposes, functionally illiterate. I can undertstand things that I read, but there's little left I can read. The Kindle has been an absolute godsend in giving me enough literature to stop me going crazy over the eight years or so I've had one, but printed matter just eludes me these days. So when organisations send me letters I can't read them. When I write letters, wich I kind of like to do, there's no point in people replying to them with a letter because I won't be able to read it. So correspondence is a pleasure I have to forego.

I'm not down on all this—I just accept it. But I was listening to The Drunken Odyssey on the weekend and it was talking about two books edited by Leslie Salas who, along with the host John King, works with, or for, my darling Kelvatari. So, I thought I'd better look these books up and see if they were worth getting. The books are put together by Burrow Press, and none of them are available as ebooks!

A cursory check of some other books led me to this conclusion: Literary ficiton isn't published electronically. So how the fuck am I supposed to read it? Don't tell me about price, either. These books are $US15 each—and the one I could find with a page count is 150 pages long! Ten cents a page? It was costing me that to photocpy pages in the 1980's! And of course they are using some kind of electronic means to produce the books, so making them ebooks can't be that difficult.

Yes, ebooks do remove some of the components of literary fiction—typography, book design, to some extent marketing—but ebooks would at least give me access to the words, which are supposed to be the important things in literary fiction.

Here's news, small presses: Gutenberg is dead, and this is the 21^st century.