A couple of weeks before Hurricane Harvey hit Houston (and
Rockport and Corpus), a series of huge thunderstorms rumbled through Central
Texas filled with lightning bolts and high winds. Here in San Antonio, we can have storm winds gusting
40-50 mph, so this is serious business.
The lights flickered at 7:15 and we lost power by 7:30. No biggie: we have candles and flashlights at
the ready for this sort of thing. And it
never lasts over an hour or two.
Wrong. This time, we
went 14 hours without electricity. The
CPS website map of local outages looked like the entire county had been colored
in by some excited child with a new box of Crayons.
So, sure: I picked up my Kindle Fire to read for a bit. And here’s where I discovered what I need to
share with you, Dear Reader.
I could only access around seven books. And I have HUNDREDS in my Kindle
library.
Whattha?
Well, I learned that while I had downloaded lots of these
books onto my old Kindle, I had not bothered to do so with this newer
e-reader. And the old Kindle is
dead. No workie.
.
Electronic Publications Are Not the Same as Paper
It’s just another lesson here in electronic publishing. There are several that I need to remember:
.
1. License Isn’t Ownership
I have a license to read these publications. That’s what I am buying really when I
purchase an e-book from Amazon. It’s
NOT the same as a paper book.
Melville House goes into lots of detail on licensing in a
piece written by Chad Felix, “”Ownership”
and other e-book fallacies.”
.
2. Download to Store on the Device
I have to download the publication onto my device in order
to have full access. If it’s in my “library”
it’s on the cloud. No Wi-Fi, no cloud.
Learn more on this from Carolyn Nicander Mohr’s discussion
entitled “How to
Delete Kindle Books from the Cloud vs. Your Device,” in a post on The
Wonder of Tech.
.
3. Download Isn’t Permanent
And it gets trickier.
I borrow ebooks from the library via OverDrive.
This allows me to go to Amazon and
download a book.
But when the time allotted expires, my loan is over and so is
my ability to access that publication. I
did download it. But it’s not there
permanently. It’s a digital library book
where I never pay late fees.
For more here, read the February 19, 2017, article “How to back up
Kindle books to a computer – step-by-step guides,” by Piotr Kowalczyk at
EbookFriendly.com. He also explains how
Amazon keeps access to your downloads, too.
Maybe a publisher wants to change something, etc.
Whew.
Now, I still
love my e-reader. And I’m going to take
the time to download my beloved books onto the new e-reader.
But this makes me appreciate paper books all the more. And reaffirms my practice of buying the paper
book of anything I read and love as an e-book.