Guitars and reading or somesuch...

Speaking of guitars, or to be more accurate how to make space for more guitars!

Some time back I started getting a couple of magazines in electronic form more for the convenience of getting them while they were still timely as finding a new copy of American Cinematographer is just not happening anywhere in the Caribbean... Waiting for my mail subscription I'd be lucky to get the June issue in late August and there was a 25% chance of not getting the issue at all as about one in four somehow went missing...Such is the cost of living in Paradise.

Enter Zinio who had AC in electronic form...Not only did I get my magazine on the publication date but having it in electronic form meant that it took up no space anywhere but on my hard drive...Pretty soon I found myself subscribing to Cruising World, Sail, Saveur and a few others...Pretty cool and a whole shelf opens up for other stuff. What is really neat is that for the magazines I want to keep ( like American Cinematographer) for reference can always be at my beck and call when I need them in some far away spot like the Solomon Islands. One of the worst days of my life was when leaving France deciding that I had to give away all my back issues of Wooden Boat Magazine ( which sadly is not yet available in electronic subscription though some back issues are available in electronic form) as Loose Moose 2 simply did not have the space and all those back issues were HEAVY! Of course just a few months later I had a problem and just knew the solution was in one of those back issues of Wooden Boat I'd left behind...So it goes.

Granted I have issues with electronic magazines and books but they do fill a need. What I hate about them is that I can no longer retire to the foredeck and peruse the new issue of AC or Saveur and the tactile experience of simply reading words on paper...

Magazines seem to make more sense in electronic form for me than books something about the way I read magazines is somehow different than when reading books. Which makes the newish KINDLE very interesting as it goes a long way towards allowing me to read an electronic "book" in the same sort of way I read a paper book... Still not the same tactile experience but certainly doable and on a boat with not nearly enough space for all the books I want something of a godsend for us whose biggest problem before embarking on a trans Atlantic passage is if we can find enough books for the voyage...