The Future of Page Turners

There are diehard readers who insist on toting around a paperback for their reading pleasure, but natural selection is bound to replace the tree-haters with their mere chunk of paper and propel the majority to the familiar hand-held electronic device. An eBook can be read with one hand on a crowded subway train and bookmarked without fumbling around for pieces of scrap paper. Old books invariably fall apart after decades in the closet, or shred to bits after being in your coat during a rainstorm. Storage space is a serious problem for voracious readers who can’t bring themselves to toss out the collection. Just as MP3 players have increased storage space astronomically for record collections, eBooks have to be seen as a mainstream medium in the truest sense as the storage area for your beloved tomes.

People are in a hurry to relax, and shopping online for adventure stories, romance novels, and suspense thrillers is conveniently logical as we wade into the first decades of the 21st century with our Blackberries and PDAs in our pockets. At this rate of acceleration, there will be a day when our minds will be able to bring up holograms of the data we request with a whisper or a thought. This being said, if there’s an entertaining old-fashioned tale being spun, the page turner sort of novel needn’t become obsolete because a good story has a way of getting around, despite the modernization of it’s method of delivery.

The antique typewriter required strong fingers to keep the heavy keys moving and corrections were made with white-out when I attempted to start my first novel. A band of black and red ink crawled on spools to immortalize each letter before it moved to the next position. Later, I acquired an electric typewriter, but it had many of the same difficulties to strain the patience of the author trying to edit the work: each page had to be re-typed so that a proper manuscript could be submitted to faceless publishing companies who, to this day, hold in abeyance any thought of releasing an unknown name to the bookshelves. The writer would spend his meager dollars on postage to pray for a break and a nod of acceptance into the elite world of literature.

The word processor and the World Wide Web have liberated the author’s access to an audience. Books are less frustrating to write, and the fear of rejection is bypassed by self-publication on an appropriate website. It is important to note that creative people are trying to complete the cycle from the seed of the first idea to its conclusion, that is, to have others read the work. I felt that sense of completion after struggling with a manuscript for a year. The story could advance quickly when the computer could make swift corrections and save the results. The result was a fiction The Golden Blues which I presented on my web site as an adventure through scenes in the life of a traveler who encounters evidence that existence is not a random accident, but a flow of the mind’s power of intention which he plans to use to recreate events so that he will meet a lost love once again. Writing any new type of idea is rigorous and has to maintain credibility to make a fanciful plot believable. Most important, though is the fact that end result is available to those who navigate to that spot in the eternal void of the Internet.

Pat Boardman is a Canadian songwriter and author. He played as a traveling folksinger for ten years and writes songs in the Blues and Acoustic Rock genres also. In 2006 he completed his first novel, The Golden Blues, which is published in the form of an eBook with his music on his one-man company website Rock Music Records where visitors can listen to samples of his music and download MP3 tracks.