A year of more reading
======================

I rarely make new year's resolutions, but this year I decided it was
time to start doing so. The only tangible goal I set myself was that
this would be the year I finally read The Lord of the Rings. It's a long
time coming. I read (and loved) the Hobbit as a child, but always balked
at LOTR. Any time I got to Tom Bombadil I just turned off and put the
tome down, vowing one day I'd try again.

Well, I'm a child no more. I'm fast approaching 30. It's about time I
read this and many more books that I've been neglecting in my race to
try and make a career for myself. I've already finished the first two
"books" (as it were), and have taken a short break to read something
else before finishing the series and jumping into the Silmarillion.

Surprisingly, I've enjoyed the books hugely. I found that doing some
reading around the topic (and watching a lot of video essays) has made
the books far more palatable. It no longer feels like Tolkien is talking
gibberish, since now I actually have some inkling about the expansive
world he'd set out in his head.

It's interesting to read LOTR after reading Dune. While Dune opts to
lore-dump right at the beginning of the story in a kind of "buckle up,
kid. You're gonna need this information to survive," way, Tolkien
alludes to a lot of things but rarely spells them out. I know that once
you read all the surrounding texts such as the Silmarillion and the
Unfinished Tales it makes a lot more sense, but I also sympathize with
my younger self who simply didn't understand.

So yes, the year is off to a good start. I'm four books in already,
including Brian Deer's excellent "The Doctor Who Fooled The World": a
true eye-opener about the deception behind the anti-vax movement in
Britain in the late 90s. Good stuff. Although this actually demonstrated
a weakness in another of my resolutions: not to give Amazon any more
money.

Following the announcement that Prime Video would start charging an
additional 3 euros per month to remove advertisments, I decided it was
long past time to cut ties with the company altogether. The only problem
for me is my ereader. I have an Amazon Kindle, which is a fantastic
device. It definitely works best if you purchase your ebooks through
Amazon, but I figured that with Calibre any source would do.

Boy, was I wrong.

I found a copy of the ebook available in my adopted home (Germany)
through a store called Thalia. I've bought items in their
brick-and-mortar stores before, but never online. How hard could it be?
Well, the actual process of signing up and purchasing the book wasn't
hard at all. In fact, it was suspiciously easy. Grimacing at the fact
that the ebook was twice as expensive as on Amazon (they've been very
successful at passing on these losses to their authors, I'm sure), I hit
the "Zum Warenkorb" button and proceeded to checkout. Without asking for
my card details, the transaction went through. Strange, thought I.

Ah but of course, this is Germany. The land of "Kreditkartephobie".
Thalia, by default, uses SEPA transfers to "prepurchase" goods. Now, I'm
actually all for this. There's no need to get a payment processor
involved when we have a standardized and robust banking system. However,
all banks in Germany - in a word - suck. Transactions are glacial; even
small transactions can take days to arrive. In my case, the transaction
took a total of 4 days to clear. Nightmare.

Finally, I receive a download link for my ebook, which Thalia assures me
is a .epub file. When I download it, though, I instead receive a .acsm
(Adobe Digital Editions) file. This means I have to download Digital
Editions, log in with an Adobe account, and open the file in a new
program just to download a sodding .epub. Why did anyone think this was
a good idea?

Anyhow, I managed it, in the end. I also came across a rather splendid
collection of public domain ebooks nicely formatted for ereaders.

Standard ebooks repository: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks

Bis bald

--
~sporiff

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