Moby-Dick, or The Whale

On audiobook, I am reading Moby-Dick, due to recommendation in the books of Jed McKenna who claims it's a parable of awakening, and to my surprise I'm finding it quite enjoyable, even entertaining. You may be aware that the book has the reputation of being "the one book everybody wants to have read, but that nobody wants to read", so I expected it to be long-winded and dry. So far, I don't find it so.

"Reading" in audio, I got curious about the spelling of the names in the book, and I realized I could surely get the text as ebook too for little or nothing, and so it was. Both Kindle and iBooks have several editions. (Oddly, iBooks US has more than double the number of iBooks UK.)

But this is funny, see these price variations in this iBooks screenshot: from zero dollars, all the way to $14! Hah! This shows the oddity of selling things, particularly digitally: the value is all in our heads. A price is simple whatever you can get an agreement upon between buyer and seller. In western countries, haggling is frowned upon in normal shops unlike in the East and Middle East, so we tend to have an idea of prices as being something set, a natural quantity.

By the way, on audiobook, it shows its length: a full twenty-four hours, some versions more than that! But there is also a dramatized version on iTunes, at less than two hours... I wonder at sheer gall it takes to make an abbreviation that is that dramatic. You must really be quite certain that you know what a book is all about and what the author meant with each passage.

More by the by, a note on ebook reading software: Kindle software on iPad has six choices of text size, and iBooks has eleven.  I think the differentiation in those sizes is too crude. In contrast, the excellent Instapaper software (exports articles to iPhone or iPad) has twenty sizes to choose from, and I can find precisely the size which I find most comfortable at the moment, depending on the material and how tired I am, etc. This is not the case with iBooks and Kindle, where I often wish for a size in-between two options. I wonder if it is lack of sophistication, or a desire from Amazon and Apple to keep the interface as simple as possible? Personally I think a choice of fixed sizes (with numbers to help remember preferences) and a sliding scale of nearly stepless choices would be ideal. Or the ability to type in a font size number, if you wish for 16 point text instead of 14 or 18 point.