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Books. Who doesn't love books? I probably can't answer that, because I don't actually know if you do. But I do. I love books. I love writing. I love laying down on a beach and reading a good book as the sun is slowly being buried inside the sea and the moon rises. I love going on vacations and spending time observing my surroundings, learning new things and possibly writing about/integrating some of the ideas/knowledge/inspiration that a trip may offer me into my own work. I love going to coffee shops with my laptop, sitting down and writing or reading for hours on end. I love meeting new people at book events. I love sharing things that I write with other people and I love it when they tell me their own opinion on what I write. I love listening to music and using it as fuel for the fire of inspiration.
I write about many things, ranging from reviews about places, books, videogames etc. to poetry and literature. I love reading and writing wherever I am.
In my opinion, it's a great time to be alive for someone who loves reading/writing. Technology is really making everything much easier to access.
Now, let me start from the beginning of my story.
I love reading a physical copy of a book. A year ago, I didn't exactly understand why anyone would pay for an ebook when the physical copy is much more amazing (nothing better than smelling the pages of a new book, right?) and it is so much better for a collection. You may be able to relate to that.
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When I actually bought my first Kindle book, my whole view on ebooks changed. Yes, I had read more than 20 ebooks previous to buying my first kindle, so I wasn't new to this kind of reading experience. Or so I thought.
Let me explain why I think Kindle is SO unbelievably amazing.
- The prices of the books are so good. Daily and monthly deals, updated versions, collections, special offers and many other things make kindle books so tempting and affordable. You can literally buy a book with 50 cents.
- You get it immediately! You buy it and within seconds you can start reading it. Many of you won't see how that is so much different from buying a physical copy (even though you can buy an ebook without having to actually go out of your home). The reason is that I, for example, read books in english. Here in Greece, although many bookstores sell books in english, some books are hard to find or you have to order them. Kindle has put an end to my frustration of finding a book I want to read. I actually had to wait months at a time before my order arrived through the bookstore.
- One of my favorite features : it can sync across all your devices! That means, if I am reading a book on my laptop and I have to go out, I open the app on my smartphone and I can continue reading exactly where I left off! It also syncs all of your notes and highlights. It's really simple to use. It doesn't matter what kind of device you have; a tablet, a smartphone, Macbook, a desktop PC, Android, iOS, OS X, Windows etc. because you can download the free Kindle reading app on all of your devices and have all your ebooks synced across all of these devices.
- Another amazing thing is the cross buy. That means that you can buy a physical copy of a book and an ebook and audiobook. 3 or 2 in one. What I usually do is buy an ebook and buy the audiobook (which is very very cheap if you already own the ebook of the same book) because I love this feature called Whispersync for Voice. This feature lets you switch from ebook to audiobook or read and listen to a book simultaneously. It syncs to the last page you've read so, if you are sitting on your couch and you are reading an ebook on your laptop and then you have to go to the gym, you plug in your headphones and just listen to the audiobook on your smartphone! You can switch between audiobook and ebook so smoothly and it's a pretty amazing feature, because you can get the best of both worlds! That way it's easy to highlight and take notes (which is pretty useful to me, since I re-read all of my books a lot of times and I want to be able to do that) because you can have them on all of your devices.
- The magic of technology. Tap on a word you don't know and it will give you its' definition.
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- one credit/free audiobook every month
- 30% off any purchase
- a free audio subscription to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.
If you want to switch between ebook and audiobook you have to make sure the book you want to read has an available audiobook. First, you buy the ebook and click Add Narration. You will pay a small fee for getting the audiobook (it's usually less than 5$) or get it for free if you haven't spent your monthly credit.
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Image from Wikipedia
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Now that we got the topic of reading books covered, what about writing books? Technology made writing a lot easier, too.
I am currently working on many different projects (a book, multiple poems and sort stories, reviews etc.) and I use some of them on my blog, but I keep most of them to myself (I don't want to actually share everything I write, not because I don't want people to read it, but because I don't want to simply give away all of my efforts for free).
I use the yWriter app for my PC, Pages for my Macbook and Writer on my Android phone.
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Image from : shevdon.com
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yWriter is a free app (created by a writer) which is magnificent for writing a book. You create characters, give them descriptions, goals etc., you create locations, choose viewpoints for each scene and you really have a lot of tools at your disposal. Chapters are divided into scenes which you can easily move to another chapter and you can see how many words you have written, set a daily writing goal (for example : 5,000 words), back up your projects and export them. It's a cool app, but I don't use it that much anymore because I use my Macbook.
On my Macbook, I use an app called Pages (it costs 18 euros). It is a very good app, with a lot of features but it's a lot different from yWriter. Pages is an app mainly for creating publishable books and ebooks, so it has a lot of designing features. It's simple to use (although I'd advise you to read the manual before you start to use it.) and you can have creative control over everything; from whether the pages will be numbered with numbers or symbols, to exactly what the header and footer will look like!
In my opinion, the best way to write a book is use yWriter for writing it since it helps you be more organized and focused on the content of the book, then export and copy-paste it to the Pages app to create your book, add a cover etc.
Writer for Android is a simple, dumbed-down writer app. You basically just write. There's nothing more to it than that. The reason I like it is you can transfer your files from you phone to other devices and its' very simplistic interface makes writing childs play.
Since I covered both reading and writing, I will finish this post with publishing.
We live in 2014. It's easy to publish a book. Amazon lets you upload your ebook and makes it available on the Kindle store within a matter of days. Blurb is also a great app that lets you design and publish both physical and digital copies of your book but you actually pay for every single book, while with Kindle Self Publishing, you don't pay anything, but a percentage you and Amazon agreed upon will be extracted from your book sales. What I like about KSP is that you can also make physical and audiobook copies of your book available for sale. Although both options are great if you want to make it all alone, it surely doesn't give you the coverage that a publishing company does.
Thank you for reading this and I hope you enjoyed it.
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