I'm a sap for technology. Kirsten and I drove down to Torrey from Salt Lake this weekend for the first time in four or five weeks. We keep a virtual office at both our Salt Lake place and Torrey place, made possible and more convenient, in part, by technology. Torrey House Press has just closed our winter fiction contest with 49 entries to judge. That's about the number I was hoping for and I'm gratified, but what I'm really delighted about is the number and quality of book manuscripts we have received to date. Maybe I just like almost everything I read, but I have asked a half dozen of the submitting authors for their full manuscripts. It's a fantastic job, but Kirsten and I, and our judges, need to read all of this stuff.
Thus technology comes to the rescue. I would still rather read a printed book, but rationalizing that as publishers we need to know the technology, we bought both a basic Kindle and an iPad. Kirsten is taking to the Kindle. We can send the stories and manuscripts as Word documents straight to our Kindle e-mail address which uploads them wireless-ly to the Kindle where we then read them as automatically formatted Kindle e-books. She likes the light weight of the Kindle and is happy with the format. To my surprise as an old PC guy, I've cottoned to the iPad. I've found the best way to read the manuscripts on the iPad is to send them from Word to my own email address as pdf files. Then I open the attachment in the iPad from the iPad email app, which opens the document in the iPad's app Pages which in turns allows me to open the pdf document in iBooks and there, voila, is the now stored manuscript in easy to read book form. Kirsten and I both still take notes on what we are reading the old fashioned way, by hand, in a notebook. But I have my antenna up for higher-tech note taking solutions. Suggestions welcome.
The third technology we are putting to use is "The Cloud" via Google Apps. All of our contest entries are stored on Google Docs where all the reading judges can get to them easily, make notes and score them in a way we all can see. Technology allows us to haul manuscripts and stories back and forth from Salt Lake to Torrey without having to carry a lot of stacks of paper around.
The paradox is in getting all the stuff to work and in all the time it takes to keep it working. The first thing I did when I got to Torrey this trip is fiddle with the little weather station I have here and try to get it back up and working on the internet. Then, I boxed up an old inkjet printer and simple scanner that have been abandoned by their manufacturers and are no longer supported by the current versions of Windows or even by current PC's. When's the last time you saw a parallel printer port? The machines are still functional but no longer useful and are going into the round file. As a sap, I admit I have wasted enough time already trying to keep the old stuff going. Next for Torrey, figure out if we can drop the phone line, switch to a wireless internet service instead of DSL, add maybe Vonage for a phone and see if I can make that work with the house heater's telephone switch to get the heat on before we get here from Salt Lake in the winter. I'm sure no time will be wasted in all that set up to get those productivity enhancement tools to be productive. Right?
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