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From Used Bookstores to Prairie Dog Towns

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Recently when talking to a friend about some of my latest reading interests, I expressed frustration with the recommendation pages of some websites, like my local library, Amazon, and Goodreads. I stated, “I love reading, but I find the hunt for stuff to read tedious.” And then an odd feeling took hold. Throughout much of the rest of that day I felt a sense of unease with myself, like a mild dose of shame. I wished I hadn’t said I find the hunt for reading material “tedious,” and I wasn’t sure exactly why, but I increasingly felt guilty of ingratitude, like the guy who starts poor, makes it big, and then loses sensitivity to those in his former plight. Thinking back on past book acquisition methods, I went way back. First, of course, came school libraries and then public libraries. I suppose bookstores existed in abundance back the 1970s and early 1980s, but I didn’t have money in abundance, and when in momentary possession of funds, they never lasted beyond a visit to the record store...
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Reading in the Digital Age

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 Ten years ago, almost to the day, a university press published a novel I had written in fits and starts over the previous four years. The editor of the press marveled about the advent of publishing-on-demand and how he submitted an electronic copy to a printer and it stayed that way until physical copies were needed. Always a late adopter of new technology, that sounded like science fiction to me. What I didn’t know then was that paper books of any kind were already in many ways a quaint throwback. The very first time I heard about electronic books was in the mid 1990s. A professor at a small regional university told me how soon all books would be in electronic format, like on a computer screen. He said he appreciated how converting text to digital format would open new horizons, especially in making scholarly works more widely available than our usual system of interlibrary loan, but he also said after a pause, frown, and a bit of a moan, “But I just like the way books feel.” He ...
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Funny Scribblers

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Writers, or at least the ones that produce fiction and poetry, tend to be odd folks. Some are reclusive, and were it not for social media and blogs they'd have no interaction aside from angry communication with agents and editors. Others are social to the extreme. They attend every possible conference, festival, and book reading. One of my favorites, both for his work and for his downright charming personality, tells hilarious stories about writers. Jerry Craven, press director for a couple of East Texas presses as well as a widely published novelist and poet and semi-retired English professor, fits somewhere in the middle of the writer's spectrum of social engagement, but his stories about fellow writers are unparalleled. A recent favorite involves a writer who attended the Texas Book Festival in Austin. The festival has been around for less than twenty years, but for authors and bibliophiles alike it's an event like no other in the Lone Star State. For many writers, ...
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