Kiwiblog

All other things being equal I prefer reading a book in bed, rather than a kindle.

But all other things are not equal.

I have been a long-term fan of the Magician series of books by Raymond E. Feist. I’m even lucky enough to be on a mailing list with the author, where you can discuss his works with him.

His 29th and penultimate book in what will be a 30 book collection (in 10 series) has just been published. It is not yet available in NZ bookstores. To be fair, we do often get it in our bookstores ahead of even the US bookstores.

As a hardcover, it will probably cost NZ45 or so when it is released here.

I could order the book off Amazon to be home delivered. But the book is not available for delivery until 13 March 2012.  Cost with delivery would be around US$28.

But I managed to buy a Kindle version for US$10 last week, and am already halfway through it.

I love having a physical book collection, but I can see more and more of my future purchases being for my Kindle (technically Kindle on iPad).

NZPA report:

Book chains Borders and Whitcoulls have been put under administration in New Zealand and Australia.

The two chains have about 1000 staff in New Zealand.

Australian parent company REDgroup Retail, which manages operations in both countries, called in voluntary administrators to the business, The Age reported. The jobs of up to 2500 staff were now in doubt, the newspaper said.

REDGroup is controlled by private equity group PEP.

Borders and Whitcoulls made up 85 of the 350 bookshops in New Zealand according to Booksellers New Zealand.

I’m still missing Dymocks. I liked the way they organise their stores. I love Borders Auckland for the range of books they have there. Borders Wellington doesn’t have as many.

It will be sad if these two book chains collapse, but not the end of the world. The Internet has allowed independent bookstores to compete with the giants.

In Newtown, there’s a second hand bookshop called Book Haven. I’ve only once been to the store physically. But they have over 50,000 titles online – I think the largest second hand online collection in New Zealand. They also have a network of other stores, so can find rare books for you.

The shipping charges for Book Haven are only NZ$5/item and they turn up the next day. Amazon charge US$10 for the first item and US$5 for each other item for slowmail andUS$20 for the first item sent fastmail.

The SST asks:

MAYBE IT’S because we’re so open-minded and outward-looking. Maybe it’s because our tastes are too lowbrow. Maybe it’s because we’re a small English-speaking country facing the marketing might of the US and UK.

Whatever the possible reasons – and they are countless – there’s no denying the fact that when we’re at the bookstore browsing for a great novel to read, only 5% of the fiction we choose to buy is published in New Zealand.

By comparison, for non-fiction titles, the figure is more like 30%, and for children’s books, about 12%, according to Nielsen BookScan.

What does this say about the books our authors are writing? Or is the issue that we’re simply not terribly interested in reading stories about New Zealand?

I don’t think this is a “problem” about Kiwi authors. Let us say Kiwi authors are just as talented as US and UK authors.  Our population is 1% of the US and UK, so you would expect NZ authors to make up 1% of the books we read if all other things are equal.

In fact it is 5% for fiction, 12% for kids and 30% for non fiction. All well above our share of the English writing population. Now non fiction is higher as we are more interested in our home country. But people get fiction to escape reality. Sure it is nice to be able to relate to the setting of a story, but just because it is a Kiwi author doesn’t mean it is set in NZ.

I have thousands of books and want to catalog them. Ideally what I want is a hand scanner which I can use to roll over their ISBN bar code, and software will automatically identify the book’s title and author.

I’ve looked a bit on Google, but can’t see too many products – at least not locally.

Has anyone got something similiar they would recommend? Cost is an issue, but functionality is more important.