On the Death of Trees in Zealand

Read an eBook Week is over for another year. Whew! It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. I think a few trees can breathe a sigh of relief in whatever way trees hang loose after the chain saw’s passed. Skippi started ebooks in Slovakia. Michael Hart started a Brief History of Project Gutenberg (with a foreword from yours truly). Cool Publications offered discounts on ebooks for the whole week. Cornelia Amiri presented live readings at the North Texas Iris Festival. Michael Allen gave Rats in the Slush Pile away free. Carrie Lynn Lyons reviewed The War Bug for the Writers and Readers Network. Time stopped in Zealand for the entire week.

In Fredericton, Joe Blades interviewed a character from an ebook on CHSR Radio. He also helped with posters and press releases for the events sponsored by the Fredericton Public Library. And thanks to Leslie and Roz from the library, who actually supplied us with an audience on the night of the readings when the town was hit with one of the worst snow storms of the year, virtually freezing traffic and the radio announced that the library was closed, virtually freezing attendance.

These things happen.

But a small group of die-hards risked the 50 odd feet of snow and minus 1500 odd degrees of temperature to join the Leslie/Roz supplemented crowd of ravenous reading goers. Security personnel had a hard time of it keeping the word-crazed crowd under control, but the evening ended with readings from Joe Blades, yours truly, Chris Owen, Nela Rio, and Kellie Underhill, all and every a closet e-writer, without a single death, maiming or groupie event. Though someone did set fire to Joe as he was reading.

Two nights later, crowd control at the library was out of control as thousands swarmed to the computer room to attend the virtual tour of the ebook world and the crash course on how to create, distributed and market your own ebook. The magnitude of bandwidth required for the event brought the Internet to its knees for .0005 nanoseconds, resulting .007 lost sales at Amazon.com and .03 missing commas in email spam from somebody selling miniature plastic penises for people with less than reasonable expectations. Three chatrooms blinked.

Yours truly presented the virtual tour and course. You can still view the guide at http://www.biffmitchell.com/eBook_Week/eBook_Lab/ebook_lab.html.

Among the attendees were George (who was also reading an ebook for Read an eBook Week), a character from an ebook (Cassie Mae Hayes from The War Bug), Joe Blades (who was immediately set on fire at the end of the evening), Karen (who I thought had been dead since she disappeared in Marrakech 30 years ago. In an email after the library event, she assured me that she was still alive.). Halfway through the event the door prize was awarded – a CD containing 12,000,000,000,000,000,001 books donated by Richard Seltzer from Samizdat Express.

Since then, attendees of the event have published 12,000,000,000,000.000.001 new ebooks – all of them, except one, laundromances. The one non-laundromance was a pictorial history of downtown Zealand. No words were used in the telling of the history. No pictorials were used. These elements will be introduced in next year’s Read an eBook Week.

Until then…make a tree happy…read an ebook.