The Creative Life Adventure

I won’t lie to you, I’m not a big fan of ebooks. Since childhood, I’ve loved the tactile experience of reading a physical book. The weight of the book, turning the pages, the arrangement of books on shelves. I especially love used books. Somehow, used books have more character than new books; even though I’ll never meet the previous reader, we share the experience of reading that specific book. From a writer’s standpoint, that’s not a profitable attitude, but it’s what I love.

However, I understand I’m increasingly in the minority, and I appreciate the attraction of ebooks. With one mobile device, you can easily carry an entire library. Searching a book for specific text is simple. I’m about to start reading an ebook myself, The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir by William Friedkin. I’ll still miss turning the pages, but my local library has the late movie director’s memoir available through Hoopla, and I’m grateful for it.

In that light, someone somewhere came up with Read an Ebook Week. This year it’s March 2 – 8. Maybe Smashwords came up with it, because they are offering a lot of discounted ebooks during that week. If you’re not familiar with Smashwords, they are a distributor of ebooks in epub format. Their web site has easy instructions for reading epub books on laptops or mobile devices. They claim to offer nearly one million titles, and that’s a lot of ebooks.

The Read an Ebook Week sale applies to my own ebooks – Lost Souls, Paradise West, and Moral Compass – which are available on Smashwords and are all discounted 50% during Read an Ebook week. So if you’re one of my five regular readers and you’ve been on the fence about purchasing any of my books, Read an Ebook week would be a good time to take the risk. And it’s an opportunity to enjoy some quality literature without supporting one of those tech behemoths that are currently destroying the world.

Whatever format you choose, keep on reading. Whether it’s for information or entertainment, keeping our minds and imaginations fueled with books is one of the best ways I know to fight the future.