01 March 2010

Deckle Edge vs. Cutting Edge


so, in my quest to overwhelm myself with reading materials, i found yet another book i want to read. it's titled the infinities and the author is john banville. standard contemporary fiction, nothing out of the ordinary. and, since i've picked up a bad habit i dropped last year of buying books, i was actually thinking of purchasing said book. i did a price comparison, found the cheapest version but then i decided to check out the amazon kindle edition to see if it was $9.99. the book comparison website i used did not include the kindle edition in it's results. hmph. so off i went on an adventure and lo, and behold, i came across not one but TWO surprises. the first was that the kindle edition of the infinities was NOT, i repeat NOT, $9.99 but a WHOPPING [insert sarcasm here] THIRTEEN DOLLARS AND SIXTY-FIVE CENTS!!!!! outrageous!!! okay, maybe not so outrageous, but amazon has conditioned me to expect $9.99 and i want $9.99. somebody start a petition, stat.

but the second surprise is more surprising than the first surprise. the second surprise is that i paused while thinking about my purchase because the hardcover of the infinities comes with deckle-edge pages. oooooooh, shivers just went up me spine. you know, deckle edge? the fancy little thing they do on the edges of paper to make it look old and handmade and not machine-cut? and that reminded me of one of the physical reasons why i like reading. it also made me wonder if people got their unmentionables in a bunch when machine-cut pages came out. did it de-personalize the book? those sharp machine-cut pages can give you a nasty papercut. okay, okay, but i was just wonderin'

oh, i don't know which one i'm gonna get. knowing me, i'll probably get it from the library. but it did give me pause.

that's all. go away. nothing more to read here. what? can't you go for one post without a link? oh, okay, fine. how about this story on the future of books. printed on the kansan.com website and written by anna sobering, it sums up this post pretty well.

happy reading . . . no matter the format!

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