As a reader, I have discovered something that I adore and that has, literally, transformed my reading experience: the Amazon Kindle.  Being a scientist, however, I have to remain objective and reveal that I can not assert from personal experience that the Kindle is any better than other e-book readers, but I did do a good amount of product research before making my selection.  It can store hundreds of books, remembers where you were in each one so you can conveniently jump back and forth between them, allows you to make notes, synchronize your reading with other devices, and the Touch version that I have is just the right size and so convenient to use.  You can't read it in the dark, but that was a problem I had with paperbacks 40 years ago.  However, you know all this already; they've been around for a while.

Now as a writer: I have discovered something that I adore even more: the Amazon Kindle.

It all started out one day when I was proofing my science fiction novel Korvoros.  The brilliant (said in all humility) notion came up that I could slap it onto my Kindle (there was a little more work than just slapping, but I describe that below) and go over it while I was riding the bus.  That was when something magical happened.

I have to point out that I had been through that novel, I had thought, with the proverbial fine-toothed comb several times already.  There have been a number of hypotheses to explain what happened next.  It could be that the shorter line width than we see in a word processor makes it easier for the human eye to take in detail.  It could be that simply the change in format cues our brains to interpret things differently.  I don't know; I'm not a perceptual psychologist.  But all the sudden, every comma splice, every redundancy, every dangling participle, every homophone error  just jumped right out at me begging to be excised.

It was that experience that convinced me that a Kindle (or perhaps other e-book reader) is an essential tool for the writer.  It has made my proofreading time ever so much more productive than it has been at any time before.  Other writers have complained that it is too hard to make notes on the Kindle, but I haven't found that to be the case.  Maybe we have different versions; mine is the Kindle Touch.

Now, earlier I promised to expound upon that slapping.  I work in Lotus Word Pro.  I know, Microsoft seems to own the world, or at least think they do, but I've never been too happy with Word.  One thing I can say that Microsoft has accomplished over the years is to faithfully propagate bugs that were problematic in version 3.0 back before the turn of the century.  I prefer a tool that lets me worry more about writing and less about fighting with the word processor, but enough soapboxing for now.  It might be that by now Word exports directly to mobi format, but I doubt that.  My routine: save the document as HTML, use Calibre to convert it to epub format, use Sigil to edit the HTML in the .epub document because something along the way never gets it quite right, put in a proper table of contents and such, use Calibre again to add a cover image and convert it to mobi, then upload it to my Kindle.  Sound like a lot of work?  It's nothing compared to the benefit, and almost nothing compared to the horror story of my first approach.  Besides, I believe in uploading a finished product, so I would have to do that anyway.

But it must be said that our friendly Kindle is not perfect.  Amazon, there is a sizable market of writers out there just waiting for you to get this right.  If you want to target us productively, pay attention to what I am about to say.  First, there really, really, really needs to be a way to simply delete all highlights and comments for a document.  Admittedly, I relaxed my viewpoint on this because deleting them as you correct them in the original keeps you from forgetting where you were at, so it's not all that much of a disadvantage after all.  At least for me.  Other writers might disagree, but either way, not having a global delete is a humongous oversight.  I know.  I'm a software engineer, too.

Secondly, adding a few proofreading symbols to the keypad would be nice.  I get by with good old Roman characters, such as p instead of ¶, but as I said, it would be nice.  There might even be room for a special writer's edition.

And that, dear friends, is the issue in a nutshell.  I've been writing since the mid 1960s, and possibly just now getting fairly good at it, yet I wonder how I ever got along without the Kindle.  You know, back in those days when everything was via typewriter and you got your fingers all black from changing ribbons.  Yet even then, I wondered how Pliny the Elder and Tolstoy got along without a typewriter, but they managed.