I am a completion-ist at heart. If I’m collecting something, watching something, reading something, I want it all.
I don’t mean every obscure fan-fiction Star Trek story, or every piece of Babylon 5 paraphernalia available. But if I’m reading a series, I want every book in that series.
And here lies the quandary, do I mix my media?
I tend to split things this way: physical books (especially comic books) are for my really prized series. The best of the best. The rest is digital. But it’s the digital I actually have time to read, so some of my “best of the best” series are actually all digital (Chew for example).
Then there’s the stuff in the middle. I like to read Bleach (a manga). I own volumes 1-34 physically, but know that I do not have the shelf space to buy any more (the series is up in the 70’s now). Digital volumes of the series are actually half the price of the physical, and take up no more space than their electrons. And they’re way more likely to be read. But I’ll never make enough money from selling 1-34 to buy their digital equivalents (maybe a good number but not all), so selling my existing stock doesn’t make much sense. But I’m much more likely to actually read these books if I buy them digitally, and I buy a whole row of a shelf’s worth of space in the process.
So for the moment I have mixed media (1-34 physically and I just bought Volume 35 digitally). At least it’s a clean split.
But sometimes price can get the better of you.
If you’ve been reading a series on the Kindle, then suddenly find the next book as a paperback for 1/5th the price, do you go for it? Or do you buy the Kindle book anyway so you can have the whole series in one form?
Kindle Matchbook is a nice theoretical solution to this problem, except that you have to buy the books from Amazon, and not everything participates in that program (in fact most things don’t, Bleach doesn’t). What’d be nice is to be able to buy cheap digital copies of everything we own physically, regardless of how we got it, but that’s an impractical business model.
I don’t like buying things twice any more than the rest of us, but the urge to be able to take things with me is strong.
Maybe this is why libraries are awesome. You can read things without the burden of figuring out how to own them.
The people in Alive often aren’t living, at least not well. From a girl who puts on a pair of glasses that hides everything she hates in the world, only to find that she can’t see anymore, to the woman who feels and is, trapped. The author captures the loneliness of relationships, and sex in particular, quite well, but it’s the fantasy pieces that I think are more worth the effort.
A young tropical fish expert gets drawn into the mysterious Cafe Renard which sells protective stones that can ward off evil spirits. And they have a couple of fish who have started to talk to him in his dreams. Are they just fish or are they gods who can control the rain and have control over the most powerful of old stones?
In a devastated future world there are three demons who live as God among men, controlling the essential elements of life. The most powerful of these is the water king, who can save or drown a nation with little effort. We meet a young woman, Sooyi, who is running from the water king and trying to find a way into the dead city to find an artifact to finally kill the man who destroyed her world, the man who she once loved and who jealously wants to keep her as his wife.
If you’re worried about missing out on Book One, or about the slightly steep price-tag for a little over 100 page book, then you’re in luck, since the entire Makeshift Miracle story is available as a 
On the eve of war a group of misfits and outcasts sail aboard the stolen German U-boat, the Venture, in search of adventure, treasure and a home. Everyone aboard has a past they are running away from, some with adversaries trying to catch up. The crew is hired to rescue a British intelligence operative from behind enemy lines in order to bring vital intelligence home that could change the course of the looming world war.
Henni is a coming-of-age story about a girl who questions the wisdom of a society that teaches that she should not learn, that her husband should be chosen for her by bribing a priest, and that she would die if she went outside the confines of her village. Her father went missing many years ago and soon Henni discovers that her father made it outside and that the world is far larger and stranger than she might have imagined. But that doesn’t mean it is necessarily better, at least not in all corners.
Kitaro is confronted by his classmate Aya with a startling claim, their fellow classmate Sana is an alien. To make matters more complicated Sana believes she may be an alien and that someone is out to capture her, or take her back to her home planet. Is Sana really an alien, or is there something more dark and sinister behind all of this?
[BTW] : Ben Trube, Writer 