The good, the bad, the norm of everything

I was tuning in to today's news online when I stumbled across this link, Why E-Books Are Bad For You. Written by Katherine Noyce of PCWorld.com, I glanced through her short article and here's what I've gathered:

Number one, it's not the e-book itself that is bad for you, tis actually the e-reading technology that is the issue.

Why? Because of such a thing called "restrictive licencing" that applies to certain e-book format.

Take Amazon.com. This online reseller sells e-books in a certain format that complies to the  Digital Restrictions Management  that they've also incorporated in their e-reader Kindle. This also enables Amazon to remotely destroy it, anytime they deem necessary - and they've done this once with a George Orwell title in 2009.

In other words, when you buy a book, you own it completely, but when you buy an e-book such as one sold by Amazon, you do not get full ownership.

Irked by such a predicament, Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement and the GNU Project even calls for a boycott on such e-books "until they respect our freedom" - and that's the second part of what I gathered from the article - which worries me.

Stallman also suggests two solutions - first, pay the authors via tax fund proportionately to their popularity; and second, design players that allows readers to send authors payment voluntarily.

Even Noyce admitted in her article that she's not sure what's the best solution for this. I don't know where this is going to lead, but one of the comments she received says, "One thing mentioned in the article that I am vehemently against and that's paying authors with tax money. Government subsidized art is one sure-fire way to suppress art, as can be seen in the case of the National Endowment for the Arts and the kind of garbage that boondoggle has produced."

Tolkien, Sweet Dreams and Fairy_Lucky_Me

Ever heard of Sweet Dreams books? If you were a teen in the mid-90s, you'd probably come across this teen romance series at your local second hand book hut.

Thing about Sweet Dreams is not the boy-meets-girl or classroom-crush thing. It is about how easy it is to enjoy the titles, even when your English is poor. Believe it or not but my dad took me to a run-down book store in Ipoh back then in 1991 and there he let the shopkeeper recommend some books for me, the one who gets a red mark for English at school.

Putting a Tolkien down, the bookworm rummaged through a section of the nearby shelf and pulled me a few Sweet Dreams book. She said she enjoys reading them too (she's a lovely looking Indian lady which thick spectacles and a few greying hair) and I should try it.

True enough, now that I'm in my 30s, I still pick up an old Sweet Dreams from time to time, and they still provide me that relaxed reading I crave after a chapter of The World is Flat 2.0 (on which I'm still struggling to get to Chapter 4).

Whenever I've reread my Sweet Dreams title a little too often, I go for projects reading at Webook.com. This site has a bunch of aspiring writers loading up their work for others to review. Currently I'm waiting for Fairy_Lucky_Me's Chapter 35 of Falling For Adam, which I have bookmarked since several months back.

Now be informed that these writers are not as good as published authors, but for a good, relaxing read over desk lunch, these are good enough.

Will Wheaton inspiration

For those of you who loves to blog, like me, and been blogging for years, secretly harbouring a dream of becoming an author and all... don't fall for that 'blogging losing steam' hoots. I believe writing is a skill that you can hone much faster when you read a lot.

And if you ever encounter moments that go, "Aiyo, so maa fan to blog lah. Facebook or Twitter enough lah..", go visit Will Wheaton's blog, http://wilwheaton.typepad.com

If you've not heard of Will Wheaton before, check out movies Stand By Me and Flubber, or YouTube Star Trek: The Next Generation series. He's a really cute actor who started young, one of those who didn't gracefully shave off the babyface demeanour to take on more mature roles exempli gratia hacker in Leverage and serial killer in Criminal Minds.

The thing I admire the most about this guy is the fact that he is one of the bloggers I followed back then when I first started blogging, and he managed to secure a book deal just by writing his blog. Check out his book Just A Geek at Amazon.com. He's got a few more books if you like his kind of writing.

^ Search for Will Wheaton on Yahoo! Image Search and these are some of the results.

So do not stop blogging and continue reading, you might be a Will Wheaton in the making.