Bad News for Amazon Kindle, the Decline of Men's Literature, Jazz in Murakami's Novels, and more...

Fortnightly Footnotes: Links and Commentary

Feb 21, 2025

Image credit: ESO/Yuri Beletsky, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Happy Friday everyone,

This week I’m experimenting with a new look for the Fortnightly Footnote posts. When I started writing these, I thought it would be slick to put the bulk of the content in the actual footnotes of the post. Over time, annoying formatting errors and the unnecessary hassle of structuring what is ultimately a gimmick has convinced me to simplify things and deliver links and commentary in a more straightforward fashion.

Same content. Same name. Different look.

1. You no longer own your Kindle books

On February 26th, 2025, Amazon is no longer allowing you to download purchased e-books to a computer. You’ll only be able to download them directly to your device via Wi-Fi. At first glance this might not seem like a big deal; who manually downloads their books from Amazon before uploading them from their PC to their Kindle anyway? Well, people who want to actually own their books do.

If you’re reading this the day I hit “publish”, you’ll have just under a week to download your Kindle titles to your computer. What will this do for you? A few things: For one, you’ll actually own an offline copy of the book that can’t be taken away. You’ll be able, if you so choose, be able to upload that copy to another e-reader besides Kindle, (although you’ll need to use a decryption service to strip it of a DRM, such as Calibre). And, perhaps most importantly, Amazon won’t be able to remotely delete your e-books and replace them with edited or censored versions.

Here’s a decent YouTube video that covers the information from the linked Verge article.

2. The Decline of Men’s Literature

In recent years there’s been a decline of literary fiction written by—and certainly for—males in general. From a strictly business perspective, this makes sense, since women on average read more than men. But I have a theory that men are actively avoiding recent literary fiction books by women, less because the authors are female than because they fully expect the characters to include an impossibly strong/smart/talented woman vs a weak/dumb/evil man every time they crack open a new book, since these books often have a target audience based on gender.

It’s a long read but this recent essay published by

The Metropolitan Review

seemed to qualify that hunch.

I found this YouTube video to be refreshingly honest and straightforward:

3. What I’m reading

I just finished reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote, from which I discovered Nabokov’s alternate ending to Don Quixote that inspired this short essay I posted on Tuesday. As a work of literary criticism it’s alright, albeit outdated. I can only recommend it to people who are already fans of both Nabokov and Cervantes; otherwise, why would you read it?
I’m about a third through Yukio Mishima’s Beautiful Star, which is his weirdest fiction I’ve read so far. The story concerns a well-to-do family who have come to believe that each member hails from a different planet: the father from Mars, the mother from Jupiter, the son from Mercury, and the daughter from Venus. It sounds like sci-fi but I’m hesitant to classify it as such, since the book is more of a social commentary about humanity and its relation to the atomic bomb.
I’m also about a quarter through Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants, which is also a strange one. It’s Coover’s first collection of short stories, I believe, and so far the three I’ve read seem to be retellings of fairy tales with a postmodern twist. Very weird, but very good so far.

4. Substack Recommendations

I mostly write about fiction and poetry but the truth is that I’m also interested in screenwriting. If that’s something that also interests you, here are two Substack newsletters I’ve recently subscribed to that I can recommend: