Books

Some readers pick up a reader and read it cover to cover, without straying into other books. Normal book clubs are ideal for such people. It allows them to commit to reading one book per month, and discussing it with others.

People like me prefer to buy plenty of books, and start reading one book before switching to a second, and then a third, and then a fourth. We read books as if we were watching two or three television series on TV. We watch an episode or two, and then we move on.

For years I was very happy with Audible, until it was bought by Amazon, and then I felt the desire to move away because I didn’t want to feed a monopoly. It is through my desire to break free from Audible that I began to experiment with stripping DRM from books, first so that I could listen on more devices, but also so that if, for any reason, Amazon, and Audible, went bankrupt I wouldn’t lose my library of books.

Last night I was at a book about “The God of Small Things” and I’d be tempted to say that I hated the book for the same reasons that I don’t like Jane Austen books, that I didn’t enjoy Blindness and other books. I don’t know whether readying it, rather than listening to it, would have helped.

It’s a book I didn’t like because it used vile imagery. One image is about body functions into the mud, that is then washed away by the tide. There are mentions of other body functions or body party where we feel that disgust is a desired reaction.

Recently I drove for 26 hours over two days between Switzerland and France and I used Audible rather than Audiobookshelf to listen. The reason for this is that when I am driving I do not want to fiddle with an app on a phone. I don’t even want to fiddle with apps on Car Play.

I noticed that PocketCasts, the Podcast App, MyCitroën and even TomTom can be quite distracting when you’re trying to set things up when you’re driving. Most of these apps are fine, if you start from a parking above ground with access to data, but if you’re underground you need to fiddle while driving. To be clear, I don’t, and that’s one of my reason for not using most car play apps.

Some people aim to read twenty books per year. Others aim for a book a week. I read 15 or so books last year which doesn’t feel like much, compared to others. Having said that, I don’t read like others. When I read I flit between books. I might start three or four books within a few days, and gently make progress for weeks or months at a time.

Since the books are often not finished I might read hundreds of pages but it doesn’t appear in the reading stats. It appears in the pages read statistic. Many apps do not put that forward, until you dig a little deeper.

Ebibliomedia makes it possible to borrow audiobooks. Yesterday I noticed that I can download these books via the Cantook ereader app on Android and iOS. With this freedom comes a quick and convenient way to listen to audio books without worrying about losing my place.

With the website interface I could listen to a book but my progress would be lost as soon as I refreshed the page. In such a situation it makes sense to read a book one chapter at a time, and make sure to remember which chapter you have just finished.

The default action for many is to think “I want to buy this book” and they automatically either buy a physical copy because they love physical books, or they buy an e-book. The default is almost always Kindle and Amazon because of its market dominance.

I was shopping for The Night Train to Lison and I found it for 6 CHF on the Google Play book store, around 8 CHF on the Apple Books store, 19 CHF with Payot, 20 with Buchhaus, or even more, and that’s when I find the book.

By joining a book club and hearing people speak about borrowing books, rather than buying them I was at once asking myself the question “Why wouldn’t you buy a book when you can afford it?” and “Why wouldn’t you want to own the books you read?” Since then I have changed my mind.

Paid for Lending Libraries

As I wrote two or three days ago Audible, Kindle, Kobo and other platforms allow you to borrow books. Usually the cost is from 10-12 CHF except for Audible where the cost is over a hundred CHF per year.

There was a time when you got an Audible Subscription and you had access to 24 credits per year. You could choose 24 books per year. That’s a new book every two weeks. Eventually, after many years the plan and offer changed. You can now buy books from Audible, or you can borrow others from the Audlbe plus catalogue. In this manner you have access to thousands of books for “free”, as if you had a paying library membership.

I have often had the temptation to dump Audible.com since it was bought by Amazon but I haven’t. It used to be that I had so many books that I didn’t want to lose them. Now that I have my own self-hosting solution, Audiobookshelf, for my own listening of my own books I can toy the idea of sliding to another provider. The first option is Kobo.

Kobo offers a plan for about 12 CHF per month for access to unlimited books to be read at once on its own catalgue but the catalogue is a quarter as big as that of Amazon/Audible so it would seriously limit what I can read and listen to. On the flipside part of my money would remain in the EU and the rest would go to Japan rather than the US. In the current climate it would be nice to remind the US of the cultural monopoly they currently hold, without showing gratitude. By dumping Audible for a US or Japanese solution for three years, or more we would remind the US that it exports to the world.