I still haven’t heard back from Amazon after sending them this awesome letter last week. So boo on them.

However, while waiting, I decided to do a little sleuthing. I searched for the name of the press that put out the book in the first place. After a couple of missteps (“Did you put out an edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover last year?” “This is a doctor’s office.” “So that’s a no?”) I tracked down the publisher and sent him a message. He, in turn, read my blog post and got back to me as soon as possible to let me know that any omissions from the book were accidental and that he was going to print a new, corrected edition and would send me a copy when that was done. I’m quite happy with the result.

I’m not mentioning the publisher’s name because I honestly believe that it was a mistake and I’m not interested in making a further big deal out of what happened. Which means that whoever is ignoring my letter at Amazon dodged a bullet today. A mildly snarky bullet.

Dear Amazon Customer Service,

First, just want to say, love you guys. I bought myself an Amazon Prime membership for my birthday this year and it’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever done for my wallet. I added the Amazon iPhone app and boom! It’s UPS delivery city over here. Not that I’m complaining, but I will say my husband has begun to look very concerned every time I bring another little something inside that eats up our precious bookshelf space.

Anyway, so I’m a student in the Fiction Writing department at Columbia College Chicago, and this semester I’m taking a class about censorship. (Remember this — it will be important later.) My list of required texts included Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by DH Lawrence. Makes sense, right? Lady Chatterley is a book that’s almost iconic for being censored. So I hopped online and ordered the book. Why should I bother walking all the way next door to the school bookstore when I had AMAZON PRIME? I made a pretty big order of books and waited the two long days it took for the books to arrive.

Then I waited for the day to read Lady Chatterley in class. (As part of the Fiction Writing program, we do a lot of in-class reading aloud.) Today was finally that day. Before class, my classmate and I bonded over having the same copy of the book — you can see the cover on the link here. Even our teacher pointed out that the girl on the cover looks a little young. Ha ha, we all said, that is a little creepy. Then we proceeded to read a chapter of the book.

I’m not going to lie — it was a pretty racy chapter. And at the end, there’s a little bit of an extended discourse using, well, the C word. (I’d type it out, but I don’t want to offend anyone. Turns out in a censorship class you use words like that a lot, and it doesn’t bother me to use it anymore, but I trust you know the word I’m talking about.) I didn’t quite remember that bit from when I read the book at home, but I figured that maybe I’d just forgotten, or skimmed over it. My classmate is smarter than I am, though — she looked back in her copy, identical to mine, and saw something horrible.

The discourse on the C word? Totally missing from our copies.

The book I ordered for censorship class has been, in fact, censored.

It’s really funny, in a way. It’s also unfortunate, because I have no idea what else might have been missing from my copy. I was going to be able to check Lady Chatterley off the list of Great Books I’ve read, but I can’t count it now! There might be entire subplots missing!

I checked the product page, wondering if I missed a note about it being an abridged version or something, but no. It’s just the first version of the book that comes up when searching.

So, I’d like to arrange a trade. I want a non-bowderlerized version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (for my CENSORSHIP class!) and in return you can have this one back. It’s not in perfect condition — I’ve read it, but I do take good care of my books. No writing or anything.

What can I do to make this happen?

Best,
Eliza Evans
Totally loyal customer

I really do.  To be clear, by ebooks I mean any book in electronic form, not books specifically made available only in electronic format.  That’s a hornet’s nest I am not ready to get into.

I have always been a voracious reader, and now that I’m in a fiction writing program it’s like I have given myself a license to buy ever more books.  Because it’s for school! In a way! Osmosis!  My nightstand is usually piled literally a foot high with my to-be-read pile.  I say usually, only because my idiot cats take turns knocking the pile down at 3am once or twice a week, so a lot of the time I have kind of a book carpet on my side of the bed.  For my last birthday I got myself an Amazon Prime membership.  That plus the Amazon iPhone app means that I sort of accidentally buy books all the time.  I just kind of… think of them, right, and then two days later the UPS driver is cursing me again.

In short, I am the PERFECT ebook customer: I love to read, I love gadgets and I have poor impulse control.

So why haven’t I taken the plunge to a dedicated ebook reader?

I’ve installed both Stanza and the Kindle apps on my phone.  They both have problems.  When I installed the Stanza program on my Mac, it was incredibly wonky and slow.  Nigh useless.  I couldn’t get the program to work when I wanted to buy something to sync to my phone so I ended up deleting it from my computer completely.  Buying books is a nightmare.  I still have the app installed on my phone — it’s much better than the Kindle app for Project Gutenberg books, for example.  I’m not a novice at all when it comes to technology, so if I throw up my hands trying to use the program, I know people less comfortable with tech aren’t going to bother.

For books I want to buy I use the Kindle, which has its own set of problems.  I have a really, really big aversion to the thought that my own books, the ones that I paid for, can be disappeared overnight and I HATE the built in DRM.  It’s interesting — I have no problem with the iTunes system, which has DRM on most of the music I’ve purchased from them.  Maybe I’m willing to put up with it for a dollar, but not much more.  Amazon does get it right when it comes to actually purchasing, though — the one-click system that so tempts me on the rest of the site works through the app just fine.

The Kindle itself has wireless internet, but from what I understand not all of the competitors (like the Sony) do, which is totally ridiculous.  I want to get a book when I’m out somewhere like in a restaurant or waiting in a line.  They need to hit readers when they’re bored.  If I’m at home, I have literally dozens of books I could choose from.  Out in public?  I’m at their mercy.  Make it easy for me to spend money.

There are a few things that are more pet peeves that I’m sure I could get over.  I like reading while lying in bed, for example.  I can use my phone that way, but let’s be honest.  Some of the romance is gone.  I also like knowing where, roughly, I am in a book.  I can’t tell if what I’m reading is an argument or an ineffective black moment.  When I have a book in my hand, I’m on more solid ground.

For now, my ebook reading apps are working for me.  I want to like ebook readers.  The price isn’t really that much of a barrier for me — I bought one of the original iPods when they were $500, due to the aforementioned poor impulse control.  But I want something I can put any book I buy on, without having to worry about cracking it or fighting with the device.

Is there anything I’m missing?  Some killer device that would make all my troubles go away?

I have been reading a lot of historical romance lately.

I think historical romances might be my first love when it comes to genre fiction.  I remember sneaking a pirate romance from my friend Lori’s mom when I was over for a sleepover at about age twelve.  We definitely weren’t supposed to read her mom’s books, but we did anyway.  The book I got was certainly an eye-opener! I don’t remember the title or plot, but I was definitely swept away into a whole other world.

I don’t write historicals myself.  Even thinking of all the research that needs to be done makes me more than a little woozy.  The details are incredibly important.   Mess up and you’ll hear about it!  Much easier, I think, to write in a contemporary or otherworldly setting, where I can make all of the rules.  That’s one fewer thing I have to worry about in the balancing act that is a novel.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate all the historical authors who put in the hard work to bring me back in time and paint vivid pictures of the past.

Some of my favorite historicals:

Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle series (young adult)

Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series (Regency romance)

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books (spicy romance, time travel, and historical fiction)

All of these examples are series.  That’s another lure of the historical, I think, that the universe is often revisited many times.   I can definitely understand why a reader would want to come back to the same beloved characters again and again.  For an author, I can only assume that getting to write them is a nice bonus.

I can’t say I’ll never write a young adult historical — I have a few ideas up my sleeve — but there isn’t one in my immediate plans.  Luckily I have lots of other great authors to keep me entertained until then.

Recently reading:

Outlander, Diana Gabaldon (again!)

To Taste Temptation, Elizabeth Hoyt

My Lord and Spymaster, Joanna Bourne