You Don't Have to Like the Giant

To change out the soapbox, I saw on Twitter a picture that made me a little nuts.  The picture was of a Kindle like thing, with a note, saying that if you have a Kindle, Amazon owns you so indie booksellers can't sell you ebooks.  Now, I don't have a Kindle (although I do have a rarely used Kindle app), but misinformation makes me nuts.  Let's start with the good stuff.
1. Yes, independent booksellers can sell ebooks.  There are a couple of different programs, but the idea is that you still get the cool, groovy experience of going to your local bookstore, talking with a helpful salesperson, and still coming away with a book in the format you wish, be it e or p. 
2. Yes, as far as I am aware, Amazon does not themselves participate in any of these programs. 
3. However, Kindle (app or machine or both) owners can get ebooks from places that are not Amazon.  Yes, Amazon has a wide selection and makes purchasing through them really easy (if, un-facilitated by a helpful salesperson), but Kindle owners have choices like everyone else. (They might have less places than some, but still choices.)
4.  Yes, Kindles use a proprietary format.  But, um, so do Nooks. PDF's are a proprietary format. Yes, formats like epub (currently, because it is all a changing) work on most non-kindle devices, but again - most.  Not all.
5.  I recognize that as a giant internet based site, Amazon presents a challenge to brick and mortar stores. I get it that running a brick and mortar store is a big, scary thing these days.  But, if snarking at the competition is your best option, well, then I think you're not helping anyone. 
6. I like brick and mortar bookstores.  I want them to survive.  Selling ebooks of any kind is a great thing.
7. But you can do that without thumbing your nose at some of your customers, who, one assumes, have made the trek to your store, only to discover, you apparently like to mock their kind.  Don't worry, they probably won't come back. 

Darkness Is

This weekend I read two YA books, one I loved and one that made me, even in my thirties, feel talked down to.  The thing about YA, is that good books are good books, just like childrens, or middle grade or adult with all its many genre's. 
Thanks to the many tweeple who passed on the link to Sherman Alexie's moving piece about how YA books are written in blood, speaking of meeting a teen with his own dilemna, "I could offer that young man nothing but my empathy and the promise of more books about teenagers rescuing themselves from the adults who seek to control and diminish him."
And also, Judy Blume's excerpted from her introduction to Places I Never Meant to Be, speaking of facing an editor who wanted to tame down a segment of a book, so that it wouldn't get challenged.

Dark, You Call That Dark?

So, apparently, the latest round of madness is the supposition that if one enters one of the last remaining large chain bookstores and ponders the offerings that everything for teens is all dark.  (No, I am not linking to this idiocy.) There are so many things wrong with this supposition, that it's hard to know where to start. 
1. Yes the covers (and the story starts with all the dark looking covers) are dark.  Often, at least. Not always.  There are pastel and light and bright colored covers too.  But, since even in the teen section (heck, even in the children's section) cover designers have developed a code that we as consumers are supposed to know, covers, particularly for paranormals are often dark. Unless of course they are not.  But, yes, one can easily find a shelf full of dark colored covers in the teen section.  Also the religious, cooking, and history sections.  I would probably only require stepping a smidge to the left (or right) to find a shelf full of bright covers. 
2. Teen books are not darker than they were before.  They may be darker than what you read as a teen, but I can absolutely, unequivocally promise you, that pretty since the rise of the novel, there have been dark novels.  And even if you try to tell me, well, yes, but the stuff for teens was all rainbows and glitter* (not, mind you, that there is anything wrong with rainbows and glitter) I will tell you that you are wrong.  Whether we are talking Huckleberry Finn** or To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye or Wrinkle in Time, there is a long, long tradition of dark young adult books.
3. Reading about bad things does not make you bad.  Adults read serial killer novels and do not become serial killers.  I read all sorts of things, including serial killer novels, and, if anything, I think reading about people making difficult choices makes me consider myself more carefully, and hopefully become a better person, but I couldn't swear to that.  I will swear that I am not a serial killer. 
4. Now the article purports that it's not that it makes you bad, but that by reading about a fictional person engaging in bad behavior then it makes your bad behavior okay.  (Follow that?)  Now, I think this is so short sighted.  If a person has an issue that requires attention (abuse, addiction, bullying) reading about another person experiencing that doesn't make you think it's okay so that you don't have to do anything.  It makes it seem like something that an otherwise normal, okay person has experienced and that it's fixable or treatable or addressable.  For all my issues with "Glee"s handling of the bullying (please, never go into a room alone to try and talk it out with your bullier) they did a wonderful job of showing that it is an issue that require involving adults and your other peers, and that there are solutions.  One of the hardest things when trying to screw up the courage to face an issue, is that niggling thought that somehow you are the problem, you are so broken, you cannot be fixed.  If a book can help you see that isn't the case, awesome.
5. To return to all the bright novels out there.  They do exist.  Whether we are talking about Judy Blume or Meg Cabot or Ally Carter or Sarah Dessen or so many others, they totally do.  Now some of you are saying, but wait, aren't some of those books about sex and ghosts and spies and thieves.  Oh, well, yes, they are.  And that, I think is the next point.
6. Books about rainbows and glitter or princesses and beauty queens and other regular type folks may seem bright.  (And hey, I'm not knocking bright at all.) But, often the stories that seem to just be about a girl planning for a prom, or a guy discovering that there's another guy with the same name as him, those stories are filled with all sorts of things like acceptance and treating people fairly and making good choices.  Hey wait, those sound a bit like the dark books. 
7. Aren't we supposed to be happy that teens are reading at all? 

A hashtag got started on twitter - #YASaves - there are some compiled here.  Also, NPR, has a great piece about here - in fact, let me lift this quote straight from there: "(I also took an entire class in high school were we read books about killing your family, double suicide, drowning, being murdered in your bed ... it was called "Shakespeare," I believe.)"
Many of these folks said it so much better than I ever could.

*Okay, I'm not sure how old glitter is.  Let's pretend.  No, wait, I checked, glitter is old.
**I know Huckleberry Finn is not as old as books, but it's old and most people have heard of it. Also, the article is of the opinion that young adult literature is only forty years old.

7 Things: The Walk for the Cure Edition

1. This past weekend was the DC (area) Race/Walk for the Cure put on by the Komen foundation.
2. I was asked how many times I had done this walk, and confess I was trying to count by t-shirts or scarves, and finally came to places I lived and left for the race from to come up with at least seven, possibly eight or nine.
3. For whatever reason (well, okay, there is some methodology) we always seem to plan to meet the other walkers by a fountain.
4. The first year I did it, one friend asked later if we actually knew anyone who'd had breast cancer.  My other friend and I both had a co-worker and a family friend (same co-worker, different family friends).  This year, I added a new person to the list on the back of my shirt, but the good news is more of them are survivors (than, you know, no longer survivors).
5. I can only hope that the people carrying their company's signs were getting paid. 
6. The number of people wearing pictures of their loved ones seems to get bigger every year. 
7. Some good news was announced this weekend concerning cancer, here's hoping things continue that way.

What's That Smell?

I confess, be it allergies, genetics or lack of practice, I am terrible at identifying smells.  (My brother is amazing at this.)  I went to a wine tasting with someone who was big into perfume and she was able to identify all sorts of things by smelling the wine.  I got as far as one of them smelling like scotch (the others smelled like wine).  She was able to explain to me that since scotch is often aged in oak and so is some wine, that's where the similarity came into play. 
So, all of this is to say, when people bemoan the fact that ebooks don't smell like books, I don't quite get it.  I mean I get that books smell like paper and ebooks smell like whatever electronic device you are reading them on, but I don't associate the smell of books with the experience so I don't miss it.  (Unless the book smells like smoke in which case I have to air it out.  Yes, despite my smell sense deficiency - obnoxious and poignant smells I may not be able to identify, but I can totally be annoyed by).
But for those of you more attached to the way your reading material smells, well, now there's a perfume for you.

<em>h/t to the Politics and Prose tweeters who passed this link on.</em>