For months, I’ve been thinking about what blogging has done to my writing. It worked great as a format when I was writing columns, but as a workshop for essays, stories and other types of written work, blogging is the wrong tool because it does not allow for the word to be pondered in isolation through a series of rewrites. Blogging is for short bursts of expression but not crafted prose that requires weeks and months of private contemplation to produce the effects at which it aims. Blogging broke my discipline as a writer, in some ways. That’s not to say that I will never blog again, but that I know it isn’t a good idea to stretch one’s writerly muscles in public first, before the requisite work is done in private.
A Kindle book format complaint
Dear Amazon, I am a heavy annotator of books and have found that in many cases I cannot view all the highlights I make in books purchased in Kindle format. For example, in Sam Harris’ short Free Will, I am able to view only 78 of the 108 passages I highlighted. It happens with many other books, as well, because some publishers don’t want to allow more than an undisclosed portion of the book to be highlighted.
I did pay for the book and, except for republishing it, I should be able to do what I want with it. In a way, the Kindle book is less useful than a paper book, because I cannot view all my annotations in any one physical place, as I can within the pages of a paper book.
Please fix this. Use your influence with publishers to make the experience they deliver through your e-reader and Kindle books the best in publishing.
Thank you,
Mitch