So ... I've not posted in here for three weeks ... my bad. Of course, it seems that every time I come off a NaBloPoMo, I go silent for a spell. There are reasons that I've been not posting, but this isn't a post about the past few weeks.No, this is a post about the past decade!
I just finished reading a book last night ... which was the 41st book I'd gotten through this year (way down from the 72+ I'd plowed through in each of the previous seven years, but that's another story as well). Big deal, you say? Yeah, not much beyond half my usual reading ... kinda pitiful. Until you add it to the 559 books that I'd read over the past nine years, giving me an ever-so-OCD-friendly number of having read six hundred books over the past ten years. Nice round numbers, nice even average, happy-happy joy-joy.
And, yes, before you ask, I started three new books today (I almost launched into Godel, Escher, Bach, but I was still put off by its length and page density), so I'm pretty dang sure that I won't "slip" and end up finishing up #601 before the end of the month. I almost screwed up (from an OCD "gotta have that round number" perspective), having gone out a week or so back to pick up a "fast easy read" as I thought I'd miscounted and was going to be one book short with a fast-narrowing window of time ... but when I went to log in the previous book I'd read over in my LibraryThing catalog, I discovered that I'd cut-and-pasted the date tag from one of last month's books to its predecessor, so it was showing up in the list for November instead of December. Good thing it was something that The Wife would like ... it's small format so will end up in her Santa stocking.
I know, an inspiring, admirable, and ever-so-heartwarming story.
But WAIT, there's MORE!
I have had assorted personages poking me with sticks (figuratively, fortunately) regarding my taking the plunge into digital publishing. As those of you following along for a while know, I used to run my own "dead tree" publishing house, and really enjoyed the process of making books. Since the new digital publishing thing is purported to be so easy (and potentially profitable), I set to thinking what I could produce.
Well, aside from my having read 600 books over the past decade, I have reviewed nearly that many (I've got a half dozen here awaiting my scribblings), and have foisted those on readers of this space, among others, over the years. So, there's a lot of "content" waiting to be re-purposed out there! I'm planning a series of 10 books, in various lengths, one for each year's reviews. As I understand it (I have yet to make a Kindle book ... although I've "published" some stuff in .pdf format), when making a Kindle book you need HTML files and in the "back of the house" over on http://btripp-books.livejournal.com I have hundreds of HTML-formatted things nearly good-to-go.
Frankly, I'd probably be further along on this if I wasn't in full-on OCD mode on making the book covers, which are going to feature a rectangular field of all the book covers of the books reviewed in that year's volume, and it has been taking hours to pull those (and accompanying lists) out of my review blog's archives.
Once I get the covers done (I'm only through 2007 at this point), I'll launch into the first couple of volumes, which will be pretty slim (17 and 20 reviews respectively), but I'll hopefully be able to "work out all the bugs" with this Kindle/Nook/etc. publishing stuff in getting those out before I hit the next seven, each with 72+ reviews. I don't know what I should charge for these ... since the material is still available for free over in the review journal ... but I suppose I should ask something. I'm also hoping that Amazon will re-open affiliate links for Illinois residents before I get into that, as I'd really only want to re-write the codes for six hundred books once!
Anyway, YAY ME! ... read 600 books over 10 years ... such a smarty!
