Tag Archives: Amazon

Jan 23

Vingt mille lieues sous les mers

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I have pretty much decided to take a little of my tax refund, in a week or two, and treat myself to the $79 entry-level Amazon Kindle.

Anyway, noodling around the Amazon site in wishful anticipation, I decided to try downloading the Kindle app to my smartphone, just to see how it works and so that I’d already have a Kindle account set up. A smartphone screen is not ideal for long-term reading (as I will point out in a newspaper column about the Kindle platform later in the week), but it actually works quite a bit better than I anticipated.

In order to have a book in my new account, I went to the list of public-domain classics available for free download. My choice was a simple one: “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” by Jules Verne. One of my favorite books as a child, and one I dearly wish I still had, was a terrific annotated edition of this classic. In the margins of the book, the editors would provide helpful definitions and illustrations of the many places and different types of aquatic life mentioned in the book, and would point out passages in which Verne predicted technology that would not exist until decades after the 1870 novel was published.

Anyway, I hadn’t read the book in years, and it seemed like something I’d enjoy revisiting. I started reading it on the smartphone, just to see how it worked, and I’ve gotten about a third of the way through the book just this evening.

I also downloaded the free sample of my own Bad Self-Published Novel, which is available on Kindle. When I get the device, I’ll probably spring for the actual novel, knowing that I’ll eventually get back some of the purchase price. To my knowledge, even though the novel has been available on Kindle since the get-go, I haven’t sold any Kindle copies of it.
Dec 09

Get your tickets now

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I placed two different Amazon orders a while back — one on Nov. 29, the other on Dec. 1. Both got Super Saver Shipping. The original estimated delivery date on the first order was yesterday; the second order was estimated to arrive today. I was given USPS tracking numbers for both packages.

The first order started in Fernley, Nev., and was last seen in Hebron, Ky. (a suburb of Cincinnati). The second order started in Lexington, and it, too, was shown by Amazon as being in Hebron for the better part of the last week. Now, the second order is at a FedEx facility in Mississippi.

All of that information comes from tracking at the Amazon site; the USPS tracking numbers still indicate that USPS has never heard of the packages and knows nothing about them.

I think Amazon is just touring my packages around the country for the fun of it.

The second package contains Christmas gifts, and so as long as it gets here by Christmas it will be OK. But the first package, which is already a day late and seems to still be in Hebron, is a replacement reed plate for my C harmonica, along with a couple of paperbacks for me (with the excuse that adding the paperbacks took me to the $25 threshold for Super Save Shipping). I’m antsy to receive all of that stuff.

If the John I. Carney Package Tour passes through your area, be sure and get tickets so that you can give your regards to my stuff.

Nov 27

The greatest invention ever!

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I found out about this from the Mental_Floss blog:

Amazon is selling a Laptop Steering Wheel Desk. The actual, logical use of such a desk is for truckers or business people who live out of their vehicles and can use this desk when they’re parked.

But the first impression you get when hearing about the product is something different, and so there have been a number of parody reviews posted by smart-alecks at the Amazon.com site based on that premise:

This has been a total lifesaver. It allows me to prop my sheet music against the wheel, allowing me to play the guitar with both hands while driving.

There are quite a few reviews; you can narrow down the number, as Mental_Floss suggests, by looking at just the 5-star and 4-star rated reviews. Some of them are pretty funny.

Oct 30

The plunge

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Well, my proof copy of the novel has been printed and is now headed towards Shelbyville. I’ll look at it, and if it’s OK I can put it up for sale. I’ll have a little e-store to which I can link from here, and the book will also be available at Amazon.com (since CreateSpace, the publish-on-demand company I’m using, happens to be owned by Amazon).

I’m going to probably switch to a new blog theme here so that I can show off the link to the e-store to best advantage. But I don’t think I’m going to make a big deal out of this in person, with my friends and neighbors. I’m still having angst about the book and people’s reactions to it. In reality, I doubt it’s as bad as I think it is on even-numbered days or as good as I hope it is on odd-numbered days. It’s just a book. There are things about it with which I’m frustrated (even on the odd-numbered days), and things about it I like (even on the even-numbered days). It’s just a book. We’ll see if anyone else enjoys it. And it’s been good experience just to go through the process of getting it set up for publication. I had to set up the PDF files for the book’s interior and its cover. I used a photo of soapstone figurines from my 2005 Kenya trip as the cover art.

Because of an agreement between CreateSpace and NaNoWriMo, my proof copy is free. I would be at no financial risk whatsoever, but I upgraded to a “pro” plan that gives me a lower per-copy cost in return for a $5 per year fee, which I think I can probably afford. (There’s normally a one-time upgrade fee of $39 for the pro plan, but that’s being waived until the end of the year as part of another CreateSpace promotion).

It’s just a book.

Dec 26

To clarify

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I stated in the last post that I disapprove of the programs in which people are paid to blog about a particular business, deceptively, as if it were unsolicited praise. I do; I think they’re sleazy. However, I do want to clarify that I have no problems with people, including me, monetizing their blogs in other ways. I have a CafePress account which sells official Lake Neuron merchandise and an Amazon Associates account through which I get a commission when people buy items after following a link from my blog. If you were to click on the little image of Steve Martin’s book in my post from last night, and buy a copy, I would eventually get a commission. (This program generates very little traffic for me, and so it takes several years for me to get to the $10 threshhold at which Amazon will actually send me money.) But nobody paid me to endorse Steve Martin’s book or blog about it. I decided to blog about it, and then as an afterthought I put a link to the book on the post, partly as an illustration and as a service to readers who might be interested in buying it. I don’t think that’s the same thing.