Well, here I am, back to rewriting "The Final Cruise."
After working on the book for five years or more, I had let it sit for several months after reading so much about the new trend in publishing, the trend toward all things electronic and the supposed death of the publishing industry. I had to sulk a little, because I had hoped to complete the novel and submit it to a publisher, who would take care of the advertising and promotion and blah blah blah.
Word is out that it does not work that way any more, so I had a little time of discouragement. A few days ago I revisited the book and, as is often the case when one leaves a work sit for a while, I found if full of faults, flaws and errors, so now I am going through it all again, giving what I hope may be a final revision, doing some rewriting but mostly fixing cutting duplicated details, fixing grammatical errors and correcting formatting inconsistencies.
Electronic publishing may be the rage, and I may have to participate in that, but my preference is still the physical book format. Call me old fashioned: Yes, I read online, and that helps me in the filtering out the stuff that I am not really interested in, but when I actually want to read a book, I want something in my hand. I like the traditional type of bookmark, with pictures of Pooh or nice thoughts, inspirational verses, cheap poems or just photos of my favorite stuff. Electronic bookmarks are not the same: I can feel a real book-marker in my hand. It has a familiar, tactile friendliness that no computer keyboard or plastic box can ever match.
I like being able to drop my book on the floor, to dog-ear the pages and to fold the binding back until the book nearly breaks in half. If need be, I can throw a book at the stray dog that is peeing on my flowers: I wouldn't recommend doing that with your Kindle. I like being able fan through the pages; I think you just cannot do that on a Kindle box. And I like the fact that a book is made of real stuff, people-friendly stuff like trees, rags and weeds. There is no feel like the feel of paper in all it's variety of forms, shiny and hard for textbooks, soft and fuzzy for cheap novels ant so on. I like being able to rip out a photo or a page if need be, without having to resort to my printer.
Trees are renewable: I am not so sure about petroleum. I read somewhere that oil is now known to be abundant, but that the cost of extracting it is going to be extravagant. Trees can be grown again and again, as can other sources of paper pulp, such as weeds, hemp and the like. Hemp makes good paper, I am told, and it can be grown with little effort, almost no input of chemicals to the soil and so-on. Maybe I am wrong but I think books are more earth friendly, they are more "green" than oil wells and pipelines through Alaskan wildlife preserves.
And books are recyclable. You can dig a hole, dump some books in, and in a little while they just disappear. I don't think you can do that with computers and Kindle-type readers. The waste from computers and other electronic devices will someday amount to a mind-boggling display of human indiscretion. Already people in the know are concerned about the toxic components of computers.
Books are nicer too, because they seldom break down, get viruses or require expensive maintenance. Books also last forever. My sister has a family bible that is over 100 years old. Bury a computer in your garden and expect it to decompose and fertilize your vegetables? I don't think so. Maybe some day they will be made of biodegradable materials, but not ye. At least, none that I have ever owned.
Furthermore, a book not only lasts hundreds of years: It can still be read decades later. Most computers are obsolete within five years and many are non-functional in the same amount of time. When was the last time you read something from your floppy disk? (The younger readers probably won't even know what that is!) There is no such thing as an obsolete book.
For all of those reasons, as well as for the sake of sentiment, I still hope to produce a real book, made of paper and ink, that will amuse, entertain and perhaps educate my readers. Wish me luck.
You may find an older version of my book at http://www.authonomy.com/books/21239/the-final-cruise/
(If you find errors, please consider that the writing of this book is still n progress.)
