It has been almost a year since I
received my Kindle Fire as a Christmas present. I'm a programmer and
I thought it would be cool to develop some apps for it. It is, but
that isn't what I'm going to write about.
What surprised me the most about the
Kindle was the books. I knew it was an e-reader and I knew I could
read a book on it, but I was so used to the feel of a book in my hand
that I figured I'd never be comfortable reading an electronic book.
After all I read PDFs all of the time.
How much different could an e-book be?
Boy, talk about being clueless.
I probably had the Kindle for a month
before I read a book on it. My expectations were pretty low. I
didn't expect to like the experience and had hard a time investing time
or money in picking out a book. The first book I got was "DarkAge"
by Kirk Warrington (http://kirkwarrington.com)
The book had its share of technical
issues, but the story was interesting and I didn't get bogged down on
the technical stuff. The story is about gamers who get pulled into their roleplaying game as
their characters. As a long time gamer, I always enjoy these types of
stories, and not to be disappointed, I enjoyed this story as well.
And most importantly the experience
didn't suck. I actually enjoyed it, and I found myself carrying my
kindle around so that I could read whenever I had a free moment.
I picked up a few more books. Most of
them were by independent authors. Then I stumbled upon Jonathan
Moeller's book, "Demonsouled".
(http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/)
The description started with "For fans of Robert E. Howard,
David Gemmel, and Raymond E. Feist, here is a new story of sword and
sorcery." That was enough for me. I loved Gemmel's work and had
been looking for something like it for sometime.
Like a lot of the books I was reading
at that time, "Demonsouled" had some technical issues, but
again nothing that detracted from the story, and I found I had a hard
time putting it down. Moeller had lots of other books in the series.
And of course, I had to read those as well.
I liked the work of Jonathan Moeller
enough that it actually got me looking into the whole world of
independent authors, and for the most part that is all I read on my
Kindle these days. Sure when the next Game of Thrones book comes
out, I'll jump on it and pick it up, but that is because I'm already
hooked on the series and the author. Now when I'm looking for a new
author, I'll look independent first.
