Psst. She’s right.

Tags:Family

Its Lightroom Tuesday! Huzzah!

Each week I gather the best of the Lightroom-o-sphere into one place for your edification, perusal and gain.

• InsideLightroom looks at the state of Lightroom plugins.
• Digital Photo Experience looks at searching with the Library Filters.
• A speed tip from Foto-Biz. This one is new to me.
• Terry White has a tip for using Smart Collections to remove crap from your Lightroom Library.
• A spot removal tip from Outdoor Photo Gear.
• Sherri Meyer has posted her top 10 LR tweets of the week. Saves me some typing...
• An interesting look at the difference between Photoshop Actions and Lightroom Presets.
• Eric Cheng looks at the difference between Raw and sRaw conversions.
• Foto-Biz takes a look at LR previews.
• LightroomKillerTips has new preset for your perusal.
• Sean McCormack at Lightroomblog.com has some info about a new LR web gallery that he’s about to release into the wild. I’ve got a prerelease copy to have a look at after I was asked about this on my Lightroom Questions forum.
• Speaking of which, I answered several new questions at my Lightroom Q&A forum this week.
• Lightroomsecrets.com has a new contributor.
• I love collections. Use them daily. Laura Shoe looks at how to save time with them.
• Applying Presets - how to apply them to multiple photos at once.
• Color Calibration. Its hard. Here is a look at the difference between monitors and printers.
• Lightroom 2.6.1 available - has fixes mostly for Leica M9 shooters.
• X-Equals looks at the processing of editing one’s photos.
• A Holga preset from X-Equals. Don’t forget to sign up for the X-Equals digest, a weekly digest of cool Lightroom stuff.

In a nutshell, I buy more books. Quite a few more, actually.

I’m a big reader, and my standard goal is to read 50 books a year, and I’ve found that I’m pretty good at meeting that milestone each year.

The big problem is that we’ve got limited book shelf space. And I don’t say that because we have one bookshelf. Over the past few years, I built several wall-length, floor to ceiling bookshelves for at least 15 horizontal feet of shelving. And they are all full. Which leads to stacks of books in my office, which really bugs my wife.

So when I got a Kindle, I was really excited to start putting some books there instead of our straining shelves. My thinking was that I’d put all the stuff I’d only read once on the device and continue to buy the important stuff in paper form. I’ve since noted that convenience, ease and price, has mostly pushed most book purchases to the Kindle. While I’ve bought several in both formats so I can have it in paper as well, it is only after I read it on the Kindle and decide its great. And I generally do it on Kindle.

Furthermore, I really like that the Kindle lets you download a sample of a book and get a few chapters in before you pull the rip cord. I’ve only once not purchased the book from that sample. I love this feature.

I also like having 60 books with me at any one time. Remember, I can get all the Kindle books on my iPhone as well so I tend to have my library with me always. I *love* this. I even take them backpacking with me; gone are the days when I had to ration myself.

I really like the $9.99 price point, and I buy more books because of it. I noticed this week that there was a dust up with Amazon and a major book publisher who wants to raise prices. Crazy talk. I realize that a hardback runs from $18 to $24, but ebooks don’t have the production and transportation issues that the paper books do, so I expect them to be cheaper. And $10 is a real sweet spot. Just like $1 songs on itunes, and that worked well. I have not bought a CD in ages.

I did see some arguments online for the market to take its course - let publishers decide the price and the market will eventually settle at a good price. This certainly makes sense, but I’ve also seen what corporations can do to marketplaces and frankly I don’t mind Amazon being the heavy here.

And in the mean time, I’m happily buying more books than I did before and there are less stacks of books in my office for my wife to trip over.

Book FTW!