Dammit, iBooks!

I came to the conclusion a little while ago that my blog entries needed some color. Maybe it's the artist in me (though that sentiment stops short of wanting to write picture books for kids). I considered being boring and writerly and using applicable shots of book covers or other literary references. Lucky for you, gentle reader (yes, I assume there's only one; and perhaps that one might be me...do you hear an echo in here?), inspiration visited me earlier this morning. What I really needed was a Mood Kyrie.

So this is Mood Kyrie's inaugural post, and as you can see, Kyr's got a bone to pick with someone today. And that someone would be iBooks.

When the iPad was due to come out I was very excited. I begged for one--this may, in fact, be the only technological device in our house that I owned before my husband. But I digress. Here's a little history.

I use my iPhone for mostly surfing the web, email, and some note-taking. All of this, I figured, would be a lot easier, handier, and better-looking on a larger screen with a bigger keypad. In addition to that, I am the type of girl who, when she goes on vacation, goes burdened with no less than six books, and often eight. I read fast. I go out of town several times a year, so I'd been scoping out digital book readers like Kindle already. The presence of an awesome reader on the iPad sealed my fate. I got mine the day they came out.

I just went on my first vacation since getting my iPad, and I've got to say that, other than having to turn it off on takeoffs and landings, it is very comfortable to read on. No eyestrain. No having to insert a bookmark or (heaven forbid!) dog-ear a page corner. But, and this is a very big BUT...

Where the hell are the books???????

I mean, okay, I downloaded my favorite classics right off, my Kipling and my Austen and my Arthur Conan Doyle and my Mark Twain. I downloaded some lovely short stories by some authors who I'm going to be learning from at the Viable Paradise Workshop in October: Scalzi, Bear, Gould. I downloaded a new Patricia C. Wrede novel (haven't read her for years) and some Agatha Christie (a favorite when I was a kid, and I still love reading her from time to time).

But...WHERE are all the modern genre fiction books? I mean, Peter Straub, you'd think he'd be enough of a big name to at least have his new one in the store, right? How about C.J. Cherryh, my favorite sci-fi writer, with her new book? How about P.D. James, the top mystery writer of our time, for godssakes?!?

But no. "Not found" returned my iBooks store. "How about some modern fiction?" asked my iBooks store. No doubt it was within its power to give me every book in the Twilight series or a bunch of Jodi Picault novels.

But I'm not INTERESTED in that. I don't want to read nothing but the New York Times Bestseller list (and you know, out of the two books on there that I was interested in, they only had one). I'm a genre writer. I like genre fiction from the top names in the fields of fantasy, mystery, sci-fi. I like good, thought-provoking non-fiction about sociology/archaeology/history--things I can use. I do not like James Patterson. I do not need to read every vampire novel out there right now.

In the end, I stopped at the local B&N before I got dropped off at the airport. I bought four books. I didn't have to close my P.D. James mystery on take-off or landing. iBooks, you've failed.