If the universe was created in six days, why does it take me so long to write this blog?

“There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are doors.” – Anonymous 

There is a never ending stream of things to read and wonder about on the internet… some of it prompts the mind to think seriously about what one has just read, while other things make one wonder just how gullible people really are.

But… I digress.

CODY’S book store in Berkeley CA closed it’s doors on June 20th.

The iconic bookstore had been there for more years than I can remember (or so it seems anyway). In the days when I lived and worked nearby I never failed to find what I was looking for, and in my time at UC Berkeley it was a nearly daily stopping place.

Zebra’s in a box

In medical parlance, a true medical anomaly is referred to as a Zebra, so it is amazing to sit back, watch the tele and count the number of zebra’s that screen writers seem able to find for medical programmes like House and E.R.

Would that the practice of medicine in real life was half as exciting as the way it’s portrayed on the tube.

To review or not to review? It’s not even an option.

I used to post a list of the books I was reading, until someone asked why I read one book and not another and why did I like it… or not?

I’m not a reviewer. Want to read a book review? Go to bookslut.com

Just as I read for the pleasure of reading, I listen to music for the pleasure of listening. Yes, I have favourite composers and musician’s (both alive and dead), and occasionally you’ll find links to them on the home page of this blog, just as you will find links to author sites.

 

… and finally…

This one’s for Doug!

Steve Jobs, everybody’s favourite technology Entrepeneur got it wrong when he intimated that books are not important because people do not read them. 

While I will leave it to Tim Egan of the New York times to correct ‘the man’ in his “Book Lust” column, what I’d like to remind Steve is that Apple’s oh so successful Mac computers are and have been considered ‘essential’ tools of the trade by a very large number of authors, editors, publishers and graphics artists.

You know, the people who are responsible for that $15 billion a year business of writing, creating, publishing and selling of all those books that he thinks no one reads.

Not to mention the annual sales figures for all those software tools used by writers, editors, graphic artists, librarians and bookstores. All that software that runs on Apples computers, and most if not all of it under their flagship operating system.

So Okay, Amazon’s e-book reader doesn’t have a ‘Mac Inside’ and it doesn’t run OS X. Big deal. The e-book industry is fairly young in comparison to printed books, but it’s there and growing. 

On the other hand, the iBook (Thursday) that this column is being written on, and the clamshell before it and the three other Mac Laptops before it have all had multiple e-book readers installed on them (Hey, guess they’re not that new, are they Steve).

… and usually 3 or 4 books stored on the internal disk at any given time so that I can read when I’m travelling… something I do a lot of. Carrying around a suitcase full of hard copy editions of books that will live in my library are not a really good option when you need to travel light and in a hurry… unless it’s a new Terry Pratchett or Jasper Fforde novel. 

Then there’s the servers I spend much time connected to… a Mac Server that has roughly a terabyte’s worth of e-books, audio books, manuscripts for in-print or soon to be in-print books and books that used to be in print and may some day be again.

… all on one of the four X-Serve array’s connected to it and it’s three sisters… and all named for Witches of Discworld fame.

… and while I’m at it Steve, let us not forget authors like Doug Adams; the original ‘Mac O’phile’ of the publishing world.

My own ‘writers den’ is a small museum of still hard-working Mac’s of varying ages, along with a small Alpha Server and even a baby VAX that is still chugging along just fine.