PX This.

First of all, thank you so much for your encouraging inquiries and continuing support.

Secondly— okay so, here’s the deal. The Amazon Kindle version of PX This – The Revised Edition is FINALLY available. Yes, it took forever, it’s true. You’re dying to know why, aren’t you?

Well, did you know that, still, as of today, the Amazon Kindle e-reader device does not support sans-serif fonts of any kind? You may not think of this as any big deal, but believe it or not, it almost drove me completely out of my mind. As you’re probably aware, PX This was written in a certain style (reminiscent of, oh— e.e.cummings, let’s say) that relied tremendously on the specific aesthetic of a sans-serif font. I’m aware it’s difficult for some of you prosaic, narrow-minded, tunnel-vision jerkoffs to fathom, but it was all a conscious creative decision intended to convey a certain disposition in my narrative.

Well, I felt sooo strongly about this sans-serif font, I scoured the internet for a solution and searched high and low for a CSS/HTML programmer who could solve the dilemma of converting PX This to the Kindle .mobi format while still maintaining the sans-serif font, all to no avail. I even sent irate messages to Amazon Kindle on Facebook®, I am not even kidding. In the end, I had no choice but to revise PX This – The Revised Edition (AGAIN) specifically for Kindle’s sans-serif-font-hating interface.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the last few weeks, I have adopted the standard usage of the "shift" key on my keyboard for most of my recent blahg posts. Yup, I’ve given in to The Man (as stupid as he is); no more lowercase-loving for me.

[ It’s probably all for the best anyways, it’s all over the interwebs, everybody is doing it now, it’s gotten hackneyed and banal and totally played out— you’ll recall PX This was originally written in the years 2000-2004 when blogs/comments didn’t even exist yet.]
This will essentially afford me the luxury of writing the sequel to PX This one time and ONE TIME only. Hallelujah.

Which, lastly, brings me to my next announcement:
The release of the sequel to PX This (formerly tentatively titled PX This Too) has been DELAYED. Sorry, re-writing PX This for the third time took up all the energy allotted to this project for the last several months.

My second book, PX Me – The Sequel to PX This (How I Became a Published Author, Got Micro-Famous, and Married a Millionaire) will be released in the SPRING of 2011.

Thank you so much again.

xoxo,
abbe

"… Overwhelmingly, e-books and e-readers have emphasized— and maybe over-emphasized— easy reading of prose fiction. All of the rhetoric is about the pure transparency of the reading act… Well, with some kinds of reading, we don’t always want the device to disappear. Sometimes we need to use texts to do tough intellectual work. And when we do this, we usually have to stop and think about their materiality…
We need displays that can preserve the careful spatial layouts of a modernist poet, rather than smashing it all together as indistinguishable, left-justified text. We need to recognize that using language as a graphic art requires more than a choice of three fonts in a half-dozen sizes. Some text is interchangable, but some of it is through-designed. And for good reason.
This is where we’ve been let down by our reading machines— in the representation of language…
Writers wanted to find a way to borrow the visual vitality of what was thought of as ephemeral writing and put it in the service of the conceptual richness and range of subject matter… That’s where we get literary and artistic modernism— not only Joyce, but Mallarmé, Stein, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, Dada, Futurism— the whole thing. New lines for a new mind, and new eyes with which to see them.

– "E-Books Are Still Waiting for Their Avant-Garde" | September 9, 2010 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com, by Tim Carmody

2 Responses to “Got Kindle?”

Leave a Reply