Did I just hear a door close?

In case you're living under an internet rock, you probably know that Amazon has purchased Lexcycle, the company that created the fantastic iPhone ebook reader Stanza.

My wariness about this is summed up in The Industry Standard's article: "Stanza has been a proponent of open eBook standards like EPUB, RWW notes, while Amazon has always kept its system relatively closed."

I'm not sure whether to swallow uneasily, groan with cynicism, or sit back, smile, and hope for a revolution in corporate ethics.

L'arbre d'or en le val sans retour

I went to France, and hey, look what I found.



Legends.

This is the golden tree, at the edge of le val sans retour, the valley of no return. The legend is that Morgan Le Fey, witch half-sister of King Arthur, imprisoned unfaithful lovers in the valley. You could enter, but would be prevented from leaving by a wall of mist. Eventually Lancelot broke the spell.

The tree itself is a chestnut tree covered in gold, created by artist François Davin in 1991 to commemorate the many forest fires that have gone through the valley. Elsewhere in the valley are Merlin's grave and the Fountain of Youth. All of this is in Brocéliande, near Rennes, in Northwest France.

I love legends. I love archetypes. I imagine they'll always be around, trying to convince us that our stories aren't original, or trying to convince us that we're writing about the greater human condition. It's like Star Trek...

(Bear with me for a minute. This isn't just about the new Star Trek movie, though that has me very excited.)

Star Trek, like Arthurian legend, was all about archetypes and aspects of humanity. The entire human race in contrast to the other races: a passionate, driven people who leapt before they looked, moved with the tides of their emotions, made enormous mistakes, and bravely stood up to face whatever shit they disturbed - at least the heroes did. Each race was also an aspect of humankind. The Vulcans, divorced from their emotions yet always simmering beneath the surface. The Klingons, sexual and violent and impatient for the next battle. The Borg, our desire to be individuals, our terror of the alternative. Even Data, the android, a Pinocchio trying to simulate humanity, examining everything his crewmates did and explaining it to us in case we missed the clues: this is logical, that is not, and this should make you angry no matter who are you and what you believe. It was all about what human beings are and what they want to be. It was about the viewer, examining his or her own reactions, who they'd side with in any conflict, whether they'd be the straight-thinking Captain, a leader, or the villain, sneaking around the periphery, demonstrating that even in the perfect future not every human being can agree on what is right.

Star Trek depicted a future we hope is inevitable, where we're better than we are now, but still essentially who we've always been. The Arthurian legends depict a past where these tides of humanity aren't just essential but magically driven and peppered with powerful, royal creatures that are still somehow mostly human. Ancient Greek myths, the Roman gods, Tolkien epics, Shakespearean comedies and modern television. They're all the same stories because the characters never change. It's us, at our best and our worst. At our weakest and our most amazing. The most gorgeous and cleverest Fairy Queen, and the ugliest, simplest Pakled grunt.



So I went to France and saw evidence of this magic on the outside of my imagination, standing tall and golden among hundreds of vicious stone spikes. A beautiful, dangerous object in a place far from where I was born. The mist didn't prevent me from leaving the valley but the valley stayed with me all the same, with the sensation of standing at the edge of legends, just beside where amazing things could happen. Things that might prove that I'm a hero or a coward. Trickery that could display the workings of my heart, good or evil, and show my true nature as clearly as a forehead ridge or pointy ears.

Sometimes I think we're lucky that all this can happen in our imaginations and we never have to face up to it in the real world. And sometimes I think I'd appreciate the clarity.

I can read my book from here

I very recently read Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It's only my second Christie book to read, which I realize is a shame, but there was something else interesting about this event: it was my first book read entirely with an ebook reader.

Sadly, I'm not talking about a Kindle or Sony Reader. Until recently both of those instruments were unavailable to me because I do not live in the United States of America, though the Sony Reader at least is now marketing itself elsewhere, and I'm very interested. But I read the entirety of Agatha Christie's first Poirot novel using the eReader.com application on my iPhone, and it was surprisingly wonderful.

The iPhone does not have the special kind of screen that simulates real paper, and it is not large enough to show a full page. I think if I tried to read with it for hours at a time like I do most normal books, my eyes would be bleeding. But for half an hour at a time, here and there, available whether travelling or at home and no matter where I've forgotten my other novels, it was really very useful. I even read in the bath, because unless the ebook reader has an electric plug leading away to something deadly I'm just always going to read in the bath.

So I enjoyed it a lot. It was your classic kind of British mystery, big family, enigmatic detective, lots of red herrings. And for the technological side, I enjoyed flipping back and forth between day and night mode, highlighting segments, bookmarking passages to come back to, and looking up obscure words in the dictionary with just a click.

Someone pointed out on Slashdot that the eReader.com Geographic Restrictions FAQ for the application I have says they must restrict who can purchase which book according to their location. I understand this as I am familiar with the way a book is published wordwide, but it also frustrates me. All the false borders frustrate me: Apple's restriction of which itunes store you can see, YouTube cutting off videos, it is all part of a system designed to protect the rights of those who own the product, and yet it works so badly and steps on so many international toes that sites like The Pirate Bay are more trusted and valuable to some users than any well branded commercial site.

I'm a Canadian recently moved to the UK, so I'm one of the most frustrated of all, being usually cut off from whatever my Southern friends are doing, and recently blinded to many of my old sources. I can't share anything with my long-time friends, or vice versa. Songs we heard streaming online, videos that amused us on YouTube, all subject to the invisible barriers of borders that don't even stretch as high as the satellites sending the data. My iphone is so confused. It knows it's in the UK because it picks up UK servers, but my itunes userprofile is Canadian. It often tells me I can't do something once, then lets me through. I have no idea how many rules I've broken just by trying twice.

Intellectual property rights are important. If nobody could make any money with their creativity, they would not go through the long and difficult process of getting it published and produced for mass audiences. There are special writers out there who would still distribute for the joy of sharing their work, but since that would make it even more difficult to market and distribute to the entire world (with a budget of $0) it isn't really a solution.

I hope there's a way to address these issues while respecting these rights and acknowledging that the world is no longer as large as it ever was. Because The Pirate Bay is still up, Scribd is still running, and lately Twitter knows about companies' quirks and snafus long before the marketing department has any idea they've screwed up.



Oops, Amazon. Better get your stories straight.