charles barrow's writing

So the Government continues to slash public spending and public services continue to suffer. Ensuring that those with the least have access to even less.  There is more talk of yet more library closures. Those that survived the first few rounds of cuts by tightening their belts until they could barely breathe will finally have their oxygen machines switched off completely. A defender of this policy missed the point, I thought, on a radio interview when he claimed that libraries are an irrelevance because all the literature that they contain is available on the internet. All apologists for library closures miss the point I reckon when they offer up the internet as an alternative library.  I think there is an obvious distinction to be made here. Literature is available to download from the internet, books aren't. Books as physical objects are available to borrow free from a library. Books as beautiful physical objects to be handled and cherished. As a child I fell in love ...

The first part of John Mann's story, The Stolen Days of John Mann is free to download at Smashwords, Kobo, iTunes, and Barnes and Noble. 

My Kobo eReader has changed my reading habits. I now download books that I would never have chosen to read previously, my taste has broadened considerably but, here’s the thing, my attention span has narrowed as a result. I don’t finish many of the books I start. Is this because I have a head full of my own work and it’s taking all my processing power? Or is it because I’m acquiring books that I’m really not that interested in? Or is it a natural consequence of having an eReader that holds hundreds of titles so if one doesn’t grab me within 30 minutes of appearing on-screen I simply move onto the next, because I can. I feel bad not finishing a book that someone will have laboured over writing. Time was I’d have forced myself to finish a (print) book no matter how dull I found it, out of either politeness or reverence to the written word, I’m not sure. I suspect that eReaders promote this promiscuity. They encourage the practise of dipping in and out and moving on. Perhaps this...

Now I'm not normally one to recommend products publicly (unless they are Moleskine notebooks) but I have to go on record singing the praises of a piece of software called Calibre . It's free. Go get it now. It's a little miracle machine. I feed in the pages of my story (in a .doc format) and it spits out an eBook. I repeat the process with a jpeg image for the cover and I get an eBook with a photo cover. Bloody fantastic. I turned my story into a PDF, a .mobi file for Kindles and an .epub version which I can read on my Kobo. My very own eBook, with cover, in my Kobo library snug between Asimov and Conan Doyle. Oh happy day. ps I also (in a very small way) helped to fund The People's E-Book on Kickstarter, as I saw it as, perhaps, an investment in my own future. Well done to Hol Art Books for getting this project funded. It's another miracle piece of software that'll turn my pages into eBooks. I mean to try it out in due course.