Monday, August 20, 2007

Book Rant #14: Technology is Tricky

I have the utmost sympathy for authors and how technology wreaks havoc with their plots. I always think of Jada Pinkett's character in "Scream 2" yelling at the movie screen, "Star 69!" However, if a digital camera is featured in your book, such that you name the model and discuss it's relative price and worth in more than one part of the story, someone in the process should know a little about digital cameras. Enough at least to know, that if you drop the camera, cracking the display screen, that the picture is not lost. Because in modern digital cameras (which this is, the book is published in 2006 and the camera is one I have lusted after myself, so I am particularly familiar with it), the images are stored on a memory card. So dropping the camera may affect your ability to take more pictures, it may affect your ability to view the pictures you have using the camera as the viewer, but as long as the memory card is in tact, the picture is safe. And any teenager who has saved up for an expensive digital, and been using it, should know that.
It's such a shame, because it is a beautiful story and this huge miss annoyed me even more because it mucked with an otherwise beautifully crafted piece.