This is the very first blog I have ever written, partly because I've never found anything particularly compelling to write about before, and partly because I didn't know how. So far, the experience of setting up the blog has gone smoothly and has been more simple than I thought (although I suspect there must be some sort of pitfalls I haven't noticed yet). I may attempt to make the design more individual at some point, though at the moment I have no idea how to do this. I'm hoping (optimistically/naively?) it will be intuitive. At the moment I have kept everything as simple as possible, using default settings and such, until I feel at bit more confident about how the whole thing works.
In the meantime (on a non blog related topic), I have just ordered an Amazon Kindle and am interested to find out how much it will alter my reading habits. I'm quite excited about it, at the same time as feeling treacherous and as if I have betrayed the good old printed book. Even before it's arrived, I've been downloading books, and have become quite preoccupied with trying to think of books I want to read that will be available for free. At the moment, I only want to download free books, as I feel a bit dubious about the permanence of an ebook. I'd be dreadfully upset if my whole expensive personal library disappeared one day! (This is probably an unjustified fear.) My theory is that I will still read paper books most of the time (because I like them), but will use my kindle when I am travelling about. I found a nice quotation which I think illustrates some of the advantages of a paper book over an ebook:
"A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins" ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833
I hesitated slightly about the legality of including this quotation, but as the author died more than 70 years ago, I think it should be ok.
http://www.cla.co.uk/copyright_information/copyright_information/
