technology – Edward Trimnell Books

English-language books and “global” sales

Kobo, the Canadian alternative to Amazon, has recently announced that its Kobo Plus subscription program will be made available in the Czech Republic, Greece, Luxembourg, the Philippines, Poland and Romania. (Kobo already has a significant presence in many other European countries.)

This move will doubtless benefit the many writers who are producing work in those local languages.

I should also note that there are presently many fiction writers in Europe who should be writing in their local languages, but who are nonetheless writing in maladroit and often incorrect English, because they have been programmed to believe that English is the only language that matters in the book market. I want Polish and Romanian language writers to have all the opportunities that can reasonably be made available to them.

But what about writers like me, who mostly produce work in English? Since I have my writer/publisher hat on now, I’m going to take the liberty of examining this from a self-interested perspective.

Some indie writer gurus wax enthusiastic about the prospect of selling to the “whole wide world”. This often comes up in the context of wide distribution, i.e. distribution beyond Amazon. These commentators make much of the fact that their books can be made available in Poland, France, Spain, South Korea, and Bulgaria.

This is mostly wishful thinking.

Yes, I realize that English is studied as a second language all over the world. But even in Germany, where English-language skills are higher than the European average, books really need to be translated into German in order to sell well in the local market.

There is a tendency in publishing circles to conflate two very different categories:

People who can function in English
People who can (and will) read novels in English for pleasure

I have adult-level reading skills in both Japanese and Spanish. I can read a newspaper in either one of those languages with only an occasional reference to a dictionary.

And yet—I rarely read fiction in Japanese or Spanish—unless I’m specifically working on leveling up my language skills. And when I do purchase fiction in Japanese or Spanish, it’s almost always a work by a well-known writer: Keigo Higashino or Gabriel García Márquez.

The bottom line is that a reader in Poland who has rudimentary skills in English isn’t going to read or purchase many indie-published novels from the United States. This is a fact that US-based publishing commentators and wishful thinkers (few of whom have much experience with foreign languages) frequently overlook.

-ET

Kindle, Kobo, my future publishing plans…and yet another 1980s metaphor

Many of you have noticed that my books are now available at multiple retailers.

But not all of my books are available at multiple retailers.

There are reasons for this. Allow me to explain.

As recently as last year, I was Amazon-exclusive on all titles (with the exception of a few non-fiction books). All of my fiction was in Kindle Unlimited.

That’s not the way it is anymore.

Why?

The publishing landscape is changing.

Amazon is still the dominant player in the ebook retailing space (and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future).

But Kobo is rapidly emerging as a viable alternative for many readers (as the video below demonstrates). Other readers will toggle back and forth between the two.

Kobo is not the only non-Amazon e-book retailer, of course. There are also Apple Books, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.

But Kobo, with its high-profile line of e-readers, seems to be the one that is making the most headway. Kobo is serious about increasing its market share.

Where readers go, authors will follow, and vice versa.

The wild card here is Kindle Unlimited’s exclusivity clause. If a title is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it can’t be sold (in ebook format) at any of the other retailers. Historically, this has meant that thousands of titles listed at Amazon aren’t available at Kobo, Google Play, etc.

Many readers, I suspect, aren’t even aware of this.

I’ve noticed a trend: More romance authors are publishing their books “wide”, with an emphasis on Kobo.

Yes, romance… the genre that dare not speak its name at this blog. Regular readers will know how I hate werebear shapeshifter romance, reverse harem romance, and all the other ridiculous romance genres.

But I don’t deny their collective footprint in the marketplace. Those weird romance genres, much as I disdain them, may be instrumental in propelling Kobo’s growth in the near future.

This will indirectly benefit the other non-Amazon retailers—not only Kobo. Because if you’re publishing your book on Kobo, then you had might as well publish it on Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble too.

Readers will go where the books go. This is the network effect in action.

But for me, publishing wide doesn’t mean abandoning Kindle Unlimited. I will still be keeping many backlist and new titles in Amazon’s exclusive subscription program.

Yes—I know that means that those titles will only be available at Amazon. But Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program is a major player in its own right. In my opinion, part of being “wide” means having a footprint in Kindle Unlimited.

This diversified strategy may strike some readers as needlessly complicated. But remember: I’m from the 1980s. And back in the 1980s, content publishers regularly thought in terms of market segmentation.

For example: there were movies and TV shows that were available on network television for free.

Other movies and shows were available on HBO (a subscription program).

Others required viewers to access them via a pay-per-view system.

Then there were all those VHS rentals.

And finally, there were movies that could only be seen at the cinema.

I’m doing something very similar. Some of my titles are exclusively at Amazon, other titles are “wide”.

Nor have I forgotten about free, frictionless discovery venues: I’ve also been adding readings of some of my books and stories to my YouTube channel.

The 2026 content distribution marketplace is complicated; but in some ways, it’s no more convoluted than it was in 1986. So we go back to the 1980s yet again.

-ET

Find your inner Cyrano

In the spring of 1986 I was a senior in high school. My honors English teacher, Mrs. Bollmer, assigned our class Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac. As part of the study of the play, we also watched the 1950 film adaptation starring José Ferrer.

Since I was a 17-going-on-18-year-old boy, I naturally focused on the play’s romantic plot, the homely Cyrano’s pursuit of the lovely but vapid Roxane, who is in love with the handsome but vapid Christian de Neuvillette. (Note for male readers: Cyrano’s method of wooing Roxane is not likely to yield any more satisfying a result in the real world than it did in the play.)

The awkward love plot is a necessary contrivance for a stage drama. What Cyrano de Bergerac is really about, though, is finding your individuality—and personal integrity—in an anonymizing world that seeks to crush both.

And in this regard, the play is relevant to everyone: men, women, the old, the young, and everyone in between.

This theme was certainly relevant in 1986, but that was long before the internet, social media, or the culture wars as we know them today. American culture, politics, and intellectualism were not without their flaws in those days, but they were generally better than they are today.

Take politics. When I was a young man, I thought that I was a liberal. As I entered full adulthood, I thought that I was a conservative. In the political landscape of 2026, I am simply an outsider. My opinions won’t please the personality cult of the MAGA base; nor would I fit in among the lemmings on Bluesky, who compliantly use unnecessary neologisms in the name of political correctness.

In the words of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, “A plague o’ both your houses!”

Listen to Cyrano’s monologue above (from the 1950 film adaptation). Now, more than ever, you need to find your inner Cyrano. Acquiescence to the whims and default opinions of the crowd probably wasn’t a good idea even in 1986. But today such acquiescence is toxic, and destructive to both the individual and society.

-ET

OnlyFans and inevitable aggregations

As this video from Coin Bureau Finance explains, the OnlyFans gold rush is already over, and more changes are coming. The platform is inherently risky for investors and credit card processors; but that isn’t the only problem. The OnlyFans ecosystem is also subject to the aggregating forces that are present in any creator-based economy.

Henceforth, OnlyFans will likely be moving in two directions, neither of which is promising for the much-ballyhooed individual creator on the platform.

The first is the superstar creator. Often this will be a celebrity. Recently, there has been an influx of aging female celebrities joining OnlyFans. These are actresses who have aged out of leading-lady roles (don’t look for Sydney Sweeney or Zendaya to join anytime soon) but who are still young and attractive enough to draw in millions of simps with credit cards. Shannon Elizabeth is the most famous recent example, but she is far from alone.

The second direction is that of the AI-powered OnlyFans agency. In these cases, there may be a real live human female somewhere, providing some of the content. Increasingly, however, content that does not feature a celebrity will rely on artificial intelligence.

And according to the above video, artificial intelligence is already powering many OnlyFans accounts. The thirsty males who plunk down their credit cards each month think that they are gaining access to the woman on the other side of the screen. In reality, they are most likely chatting with a woman (or possibly even a man) in a call center-like facility in the Philippines or Vietnam.

Which brings us to another familiar realization: OnlyFans subscribers really are a gullible, pathetic bunch of men.

-ET

AI slop and genre slop: the most pessimistic view possible, and reasons for optimism

David Van Dyke Stewart is waxing pessimistic about the state of indie publishing. In his view, indie publishing is so threatened by AI slop and genre slop that it is no longer worth doing anymore.

He announces in the video below that he intends to “step away” from indie publishing. He’s even flirting with the idea of unpublishing some of his existing novels, because he does not want to be associated with some of the ridiculous excesses that we now see in indie publishing.

A part of me fully sympathizes. As I’ve written previously, I can hardly stand to enter indie writing groups on Facebook anymore. 90% of the authors participating in such spaces are now writing shifter romances, reverse harem—and similarly ridiculous books adorned with man chests. Then there are the dogs and cats solving mysteries, the witch cozies, etc. It is possible for one to feel ridiculous by association.

As for AI…yes, that is a problem of an entirely different magnitude.

And yet…I remain optimistic, if not in the short run, then at least in the long run.

Why? Because I’ve seen this movie before. I remember almost twenty years ago, how everyone was predicting that the entire internet would be taken down—not by AI, but by content farms.

For those of you who don’t remember (or who are a little fuzzy) on the history, content farms were junk sites that were hastily written to maximize clicks in Google search results, and thereby maximize AdSense income. For a few years they represented a real threat to the integrity of the internet.

But the content farms eventually went the way of the pterodactyl. Google changed its algorithm. Search engine users became more discriminating, and learned to recognize query results that led to content farms. The economic incentive for the content farms went away.

That’s what I expect to happen with AI slop (and—to some degree—genre slop). How long can it remain profitable to turn out template-driven trashy romance novels, for instance? Even for the voracious porn/romance readership?

And once you throw AI into the mix, the race to the unprofitable bottom is inevitable. I look for the genre slop writers, and the AI slop producers, to eventually be driven out by their own excesses.

One irony here is that AI slop and genre slop have a mutually destructive, symbiotic relationship. Template-driven, repetitive genre novels are the easiest to produce with various AI programs.

What does concern me is that before it all goes away, it will completely undermine the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem. This is a real threat in the short- to mid-term.

But I don’t look for AI and genre slop to take down indie publishing as an industry. As long as the internet has existed, there have been both outright scammers and individuals who seek to maximize profit by turning out low-effort, repetitive content. That problem is not going to go away. One bag of tricks will simply be replaced by another.

The rest of us will soldier on. As for David Van Dyke Stewart, I hope that he soldiers on, too. I haven’t read any of his novels; but I have watched some of his YouTube content. He strikes me as a thoughtful fellow.

-ET

Draft 2 Digital, AI slop, and the evil necessity of publishing fees

Draft 2 Digital is a company that provides indie authors and small publishers with a single interface for “wide” distribution of ebooks to a host of online retailers. The company has historically taken a small percentage of sales revenues in exchange for its services.

But in recent years, AI slop has invaded and overwhelmed the publishing world. There is now an entire online ecosystem of low-content and junk content churned out by AI writing tools. This “book spam” is clogging up online bookstores and retailers with content that no one is ever going to buy in any meaningful quantity. And with AI tools, the book spammers can do this at scale.

To make matters worse, there is also now an ecosystem of YouTube and TikTok hucksters, teaching others how to “make millions!” with these techniques. This is like the content farm problem of the 00s, but exponentially larger.

Draft2Digital has addressed the problem in a number of ways. Some time ago, the company announced that it will no longer handle nonfiction titles covering topics that are low-hanging fruit for spammers (exercise, cryptocurrency, diet, and various New Age subject matter).

D2D also announced that it will begin charging a $20 set-up fee for new accounts, along with a $12 per year account maintenance fee for any publishers who earn less than $100 per year.

In other words, less than $8.33 per month.

Needless to say, there are people kvetching about this on the Internet. As for me, I am 100% in favor of it.

This is not because I want to see more fees for their own sake. But rather because something needs to be done about the sheer volume of online garbage.

And when I use terms like “online garbage”, I’m not talking about stories and books that don’t suit my taste. Hey, if someone has labored over their billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novel, and they want to publish that, let them go for it. (Although to be perfectly honest, I would prefer that they didn’t. The romance genres have become as trashy as Pornhub in recent years. But I digress.)

I’m talking, rather, about the low-content and extremely low-effort books produced, often with AI tools, for the sole purpose of manipulating bookstore algorithms and exploiting subscription services like Kindle Unlimited. No one benefits from the presence of that—including the authors of billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novels.

A modest per-book monthly or annual nuisance fee would prune the sheer volume of junk that is accumulating on online bookstores. (Listen to Mal Cooper’s video below.)

I know the nature of the internet. There are people out there who believe that anything on the Internet should always be free, no matter what it is, and no matter what costs are associated with it, simply because it’s on the Internet. That’s an argument that goes back at least 25 years, to the original debates over file-sharing and NAPSTER.

But AI slop threatens to undermine, if not destroy, indie publishing. Online retailers and distributors will never have the manpower to meticulously vet every title. In lieu of that, per-title maintenance fees may be a necessary evil for combating AI slop.

-ET

What about the literary translators? The selective outrage over AI

I occasionally check various online forums that are part of what is known as the “online writing community”. These mostly exist on social media platforms like Reddit and Facebook. I do this as little as possible.

Over the past few years, I have noticed a great deal of outrage in these venues over the use of artificial intelligence, more commonly known as “AI”.

By now, anyone with a dog in this fight is aware of the arguments. On one side there is the case for the inevitability of technological advancements, and putting those advancements to use in the marketplace. On the other side, there is the argument against replacing living, breathing human beings with soulless software. There is also the fact that those living, breathing human beings require paychecks to purchase food, rent, and health insurance.

Writers are kind of in the middle of all this. There are a handful of online hacks teaching both weary and aspiring writers how to generate something approximating a novel with software prompts. This is an entirely separate issue and not one that I will cover in depth here.

But writing a novel with software is essentially writers trying to replace themselves with AI. Most writers already have fixed views on this one. Those who actually enjoy writing laugh at the very idea. Others are burned out or frustrated, and would love nothing more than to hand off their creative work to a software package.

That’s a fool’s trap; because the results of AI writing are about what you would expect. (Note: The people teaching these AI writing shortcuts don’t like the results, either. They are making money by teaching their “secrets” to others, not by selling the AI novels they’re creating. But I digress.)

No, where the real conflict—and often the moral dilemma—arises for writers is in the realm of adjacent services. Some of these adjacent services are not cheap, after all.

Four hundred dollars for a book cover from a freelance artist? Three to four grand for an audiobook from a narrator? This is real money, even from the perspective of people who have real businesses. Why not just rely on AI for these services and save all that cash?

This is the point where the debate predictably gets nasty, often with freelance illustrators and voice actors jumping into the fray. I’m not going to weigh the different arguments here, nor condemn anyone for taking a strong, emotionally charged position. People’s livelihoods and bottom lines are on the line on both sides of these issues.

I have noticed something new, though—and more than a little ironic. One of the low-cost AI services to hit the market recently is AI translation. It used to cost thousands of dollars to get a translation of a manuscript from English into Spanish, French, or German, let alone into Japanese or Mandarin. Software now takes care of this at minimal cost…after a fashion. Amazon, in fact, has recently rolled out a beta version of AI translation for writers.

In online writing forums, I have seen a few debates about the accuracy of AI literary translations. Some writers wonder aloud (with good reason) if a whiz-bang AI translation program is trustworthy for a 90K-word book. (Hint: it almost certainly isn’t.) But I have seen none of the usual hand-wringing about replacing human translators with software. Not a peep. The outrage over AI, it turns out, is highly selective. What about the “art” of literary translation? What about the literary translators’ paychecks?

I’ve seen this cycle repeat many times over the years. An issue provokes outrage among a certain group of people…until it doesn’t. In the early 1980s, folks on the progressive left used to inveigh against nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. But for a variety of reasons, nuclear weapons are no longer the fashionable concern that they once were. Folks with a progressive mindset now see the plastic bags at their local grocery store as a far more pressing issue than warheads that could wipe out the entire world in a few hours.

I used to work as a translator myself (Japanese/English). I did corporate work, not literary work. For a three-year stretch during the 1990s, I made a very comfortable income doing nothing else. (I was the in-house interpreter/translator at a Japanese automotive components manufacturer in Ohio.)

I haven’t worked as a translator for well over 20 years. But if I did, I would no doubt have some strong feelings about the tendency toward replacing human translators with machines.

Another irony: I saw that shift coming in translation even in the 1990s. Sometime around 1995, I began reading articles about Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu experimenting with machine translation. End-to-end, seamless machine translation has long been a goal in the corporate sector.

Therefore, I’m not surprised to see software-based translations in the age of AI. I am, though, somewhat surprised that literary translators aren’t more vocal about being replaced. They are certainly a reticent bunch…at least when compared to the hyper-vocal illustrators and voice actors.

-ET

Social interactions in the 1980s were a different game completely

In the 1980s, there was no social media and no dating apps. We didn’t even have email.

If you wanted to meet someone new, there was usually only one way to go about it.

You had to approach them in person, and strike up a conversation.

Below is a scene from NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988. In the scene below, the main character must jump through numerous hoops to meet an attractive young woman:

NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988

CHAPTER 43

Since my hand had previously been stamped, I had little trouble gaining reentry to the Casablanca Club. I walked by the doorman as if I owned the place, flashing him a glimpse of my left hand. He gave me no trouble this time.

Once inside, I got another break: there was no sign of Lance Corporal Evans or his fellow marines.

But where was Sergeant George Tuttle, fearless defender of the law in Cincinnati “for more than thirty years?”

Maybe I would get lucky there. Maybe the cop had called it a night, or (more likely) been drawn away from the Casablanca Club by other police business.

I only had to walk around for a few minutes before I spotted her: the young woman from the Tangeman University Center. The pretty blonde who had caught my attention that day.

She was standing by herself at the edge of the nearest dance floor. Where were the other young women she had entered with, the ones I had assumed to be her friends? Was she meeting a guy here?

I didn’t know. And in that moment, I didn’t care. It was full speed ahead.

“Hi,” I said, when I got within speaking distance.

She turned toward me. I thought I detected a flash of recognition.

“You go to the University of Cincinnati, don’t you?” I asked.

Strictly speaking, this was a lame question with an obvious answer. The Casablanca Club was located a few blocks from the university, and we were both of university age. Probably half of the patrons here tonight were university students.

But few lines uttered by young men to young women in bars and nightclubs are brilliant. This wasn’t Toastmasters. Nor was I making an argument before Dr. Blevins. I was willing to improvise.

She smiled, but seemed at a loss for words.

“I think we may have spoken briefly in the Tangeman Center. That day you were looking at all the Armed Forces displays.

“More like I spoke briefly,” she said. “The proverbial cat seemed to have gotten your tongue.”

“There are no cats on my tongue now.”

This had to have been the most awkward line a man ever uttered to a woman in a bar. But it did the trick. She laughed.

“I’m Kim,” she said.

“I’m Paul.”

We talked for a few minutes more. I learned that she was a marketing major…common enough at the University of Cincinnati.

This was actually working, I suddenly realized. There was none of the awkwardness and fumbling that I’d felt when trying to talk to Tara and Courtney.

The difference, of course, was that the attraction with Kim was mutual, rather than one-sided. I therefore didn’t have to talk her into anything. All I had to do was go with the flow, be moderately assertive, and not say anything stupid.

But I was also conscious of Scott, who would right now be waiting for me in my car. I was also aware that in my very presence here, I was defying police orders, and breaking a promise I had made to a sergeant in the Cincinnati Police Department.

“I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Kim, but—”

“But now you have to go.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Call it intuition. Or maybe that you seem an awful lot like someone in a hurry.”

“I am in a hurry,” I confessed. “My friend is waiting for me at my car. Before I go, though: would you give me your phone number? I’d like to call you sometime.”

She smiled. “That’s usually what people have in mind when they ask for someone’s phone number. They want to call them sometime.”

A few minutes later, I was walking toward the main entrance/exit of The Casablanca Club with Kim’s phone number in my pocket.

She had written it on one of the club’s cocktail napkins, along with her last name. She was Kim Jones.

I was feeling on top of the world, more or less. Wait until Scott heard about this, I thought triumphantly.

I was outside in the parking lot of the Casablanca Club, almost home free, when everything unraveled.

“I thought you’d learned your lesson,” an older male voice declared. “But I guess I was wrong about that, wasn’t I?”

NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988 is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play and Apple Books.

iOS 26 bugs and my old guy instincts

You all know me, or a version of me: I’m one of those stick-in-the-mud older/middle-age people who refuses to upgrade to the latest version of whatever operating system happens to be relevant.

I do this for the reason that most older people are skeptical/cautious: experience. In 2009, Microsoft destroyed my PC with an automated upgrade of the Windows XP operating system. Trust us, Microsoft said. Enable those automated updates. And I, like a fool, believed them.

I’ve since become a Mac user. Apple has yet to outright destroy any of my devices with an upgrade. But they’ve rendered several of them less usable, slower, or buggier.

I’ve therefore adopted a policy over the last five to ten years: one operating system per device. (This isn’t as radical as it sounds; I upgrade my devices at reasonable intervals.) My expectation to the tech companies is: Get it right the first time.

I purchased my iPhone 16 Plus last spring. The factory-installed iOS was 18.

I was planning to keep that. It worked. Then I read numerous online reports from the “techies” about how essential it was to upgrade. Iranian and Russian agents could exploit my current iOS, hack my phone, and steal all my data.

So I upgraded to iOS 26.4.1 last week. I’ve got a fancy new “liquid glass” display, and lots of new emojis that I’ll never use.

But CarPlay no longer works. (CarPlay worked perfectly, every time, on iOS 18.) YouTube videos freeze and error out. These are both documented flaws that have been discussed on Reddit and in other online venues.

Two observations from all this. First, this demonstrates yet again that our over- reliance on digital technology is a weakness as well as a convenience. I know young people who can’t read a map, write in cursive, or maintain their composure during a voice call, all because they’ve been hobbled by reliance on tech. But what happens when the machines glitch?

Secondly, I’m disappointed at Apple’s shoddiness. I’m an indie author, and I feel guilty if I release a $4.99 ebook with a handful of typos in it. But most of us paid close to a grand for our iPhones. Apple is a $350 billion company. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, earns $74 million per year in total compensation. Am I asking too much, when I humbly request that Apple not break CarPlay and destabilize YouTube when they release an update that I am told I must have?

I’m sure—or no, scratch that—I hope that Apple will eventually fix these bugs, along with the other ones I have yet to discover.

In the meantime, I wish I would have listened to my old guy instincts last week, and stayed on iOS 18.

-ET

Killer robots in the factory

“The Robots of Jericho” is one of my early short stories. I wrote this back in 2009.

I spent a lot of years in the automotive industry, and countless hours in automotive plants.

Many of these factories had industrial robots. If you’ve ever watched industrial robots move, you’ll agree that they often appear to be alive.

Of course, I know that industrial robots aren’t really alive and sentient. But what if they were? “The Robots of Jericho” is a story about such a scenario.

“The Robots of Jericho” is available in print and ebook as one of the stories in my Hay Moon short story collection. But you’re welcome to listen to the story in the video below:

Gen X memories: childhood before geo-tracking

Using various phone apps, many parents now track the movements of their progeny from minute-to-minute. Some parents even track the movements of their adult children. One of my friends can tell you, at any minute of the day, where his two children are. My friend’s children are 26 and 30 years old.

I won’t mince words here. I find all of this geo-tracking to be a little neurotic, not to mention claustrophobic for those who must endure it.

It was different for those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, of course. At most hours of the day, our parents didn’t know exactly where we were. Oh, sure, they might have had some ideas, in the same way that I know Russia is to the east of me, and Argentina is to the far south. But don’t ask me to give you air travel coordinates. Suburban parents in the 1970s and 1980s relied on similar guesstimates regarding their children’s whereabouts.

During the summer months especially, we took full advantage of this location anonymity. The one thing most every Gen X kid had was a bike. And a bike was a license to travel distances your parents never would have approved of. Some of us planned long quests that would have been worthy of a JRR Tolkien novel like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.

The motivation for these unauthorized trips was often some kind of contraband: alcohol, cigarettes, or firecrackers. Sometimes it was just the thrill of seeing how far your ten speed would carry you in a single June or July morning.

Among adolescent boys, the motivations were often of an amorous inclination. I turned 13 in the summer of 1981. One of my neighborhood friends—I’ll call him Glen—had somehow initiated a running phone conversation with three girls who lived in a neighborhood far from where we lived. Somehow three of us—Glen, me, and one other boy—started talking to the girls, always via landline (the only communication option in those days) and always from Glen’s house.

The girls sounded both pretty and friendly. The girls said they wanted to meet us, but we would have to go to them. And so we planned a bicycle trip to their neighborhood.

Did we ask our parents’ permission? Of course not.

We set off on our bikes one morning around nine a.m. Being randy young males, we eagerly speculated about what might happen at our destination.

When we arrived nearly two hours later, however, the girls were nowhere to be found. Forty-five years after the fact, I’m not sure exactly what happened. We either had the wrong address, or we were duped. Disappointed, we rode back as a particularly hot afternoon settled in.

The lesson I learned from this was: if it seems too good to be true, a little too convenient, then it probably is too good to be true.

But that is the kind of life lesson that you can’t learn on a computer, and certainly not on social media. I’m grateful that I came of age when free-range childhood was still a thing. To grow up without geo-tracking was both a privilege and a blessing.

-ET

1980s tech was expensive, and it didn’t do much

I vaguely remember the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Introduced in 1980, this little device was manufactured and marketed by the Tandy Corporation/Radio Shack. (Every shopping mall in the 1980s had a Radio Shack.) Science fiction author Isaac Asimov appeared in a series of marketing spots for the gadget.

1980 Radio Shack ad featuring the TRS-80 Pocket Computer and Isaac Asimov

I didn’t own a TRS-80 Pocket Computer, however. The MSRP was $169.95. In present-day money, that’s about $670—the cost of a base-model iPhone.

And of course, the TRS-80 Pocket Computer had a minimal functionality when compared to an iPhone. It couldn’t make phone calls, play music, or take photos. It couldn’t surf the Internet—which didn’t yet exist, anyway.

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was programmable in BASIC (which couldn’t do much for the average consumer). Other than that, it was basically a glorified pocket calculator.

Herein lies an important realization about 1980s tech: it was very expensive, and it didn’t do much. Even if you could afford it, you usually concluded that you could do without it.

-ET

“Don’t Stop Believin’”: a song with multiple lives

I was in the 8^th grade in 1981-2, when Escape, Journey’s seventh studio album, was the latest thing.

Escape is one of the few rock albums with no duds. Every song is good—if you like Journey’s style of music.

But the best song on the album, perhaps, is “Don’t Stop Believin’”. It is a great song because it is simultaneously specific and universal.

We wonder about the small town girl, and the city boy “born and raised in South Detroit.” What compelled each of them to take “the midnight train going anywhere”?

And at the same time, the song is vague enough that we can each apply it to our individual stories. “Whoa, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.” My movie has gone on for 44 years since I first heard this song, and counting.

For years, this song instantly took me back to the 1981-2 school year, and the adolescent I was at that time. The song can still do that.

But then a few years ago, I watched The Sopranos from start to finish. (I was about a decade behind everyone else in doing this…the story of my life.) Then, for a long time, I would see the final, iconic scene of The Sopranos when I heard, “Don’t Stop Believin’”.

Most recently, I have discovered First to Eleven’s interpretation of the song. (First to Eleven is a very talented cover band based in Erie, Pennsylvania.)

None of the members of First to Eleven was even born when I heard “Don’t Stop Believin’” for the first time, back in 1981. (They are all very young.) And yet, their music video, and lead vocalist Audra Miller’s performance, put yet another spin on the song for me.

And some people worry—or hope—that AI will replace serious musicians? They base this on the fact (for example) that AI can now reassemble good music into mediocre music. (See my recent post about The Velvet Sundown.)

AI will never be good for anything but mediocrity. Only a human imagination could have come up with “Don’t Stop Believin’” almost half a century ago. And it took human imagination to come up with all these reimaginings of the song since then.

-ET

The bygone, venerable 8-track

Members of my generation lived to see plenty of changes in the ways popular music is consumed. We were born in the golden age of the vinyl album. As adults, many of us are learning to cope with streaming music services.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the audio cassette tape was the most popular means of buying music and listening to it. When I see nostalgic Facebook posts about physical music media from the 1980s, the cassette tape is most often the subject.

But there was another musical format that was already dying out as the 1980s began, but which was actually quite good, by the standards of the time. I’m talking about the venerable 8-track tape.

The 8-track was a plastic cartridge that had dimensions of 5.25 x 4 x 0.8 inches. Like the audio cassette, the 8-track contained a magnetic tape. But unlike the audio cassette, the 8-track was much less prone to kinking and tangling.

The 8-track was actually 1960s technology. The 8-track took off in the middle of that decade, when auto manufacturers began offering 8-track players as factory-installed options in new vehicles. Throughout the 1970s, 8-track players were popular options on new cars. 8-tracks were further popularized by subscription music services like Columbia House.

Columbia House magazine ad from the 1970s

I purchased my first home stereo system for my bedroom in 1982, with money I had saved from my grass-cutting job. I bought it at Sears, which was one of the best places to buy mid-level home audio equipment at that time. The stereo included an AM/FM radio, a turntable for vinyl records, a cassette deck, and an 8-track player.

I quickly discovered that I liked the 8-track format the best, because of its relatively compact size and ease of use. That spring I bought 8-track versions of Foreigner 4, Styx’s Paradise Theater, and the Eagles Live album. All of these produced good sound (again, by the standards of that era), and none of them ever jammed or tangled. I was convinced that I had found my musical format.

It has often been my destiny to jump on a trend just as it is nearing its end. Little did I know that my beloved 8-track was already in steep decline.

8-track sales in the USA peaked in 1978, and began falling after that. The culprit was the slightly more compact, but far more error-prone audio cassette. This was the format that all the retailers were suddenly pushing. By the early 1980s, cassette players were also replacing 8-track players in cars.

I would like to say that I yielded to the march of technological progress, but this wouldn’t be truly accurate. The audio cassette, invented in 1963, was slightly older technology than the 8-track.

I did, however, yield to the march of commercial trends, simply because I had no choice. Nineteen-eighty-three was the year that retailers began phasing out 8-tracks in stores. You could still purchase them from subscription services, but they were disappearing from the shelves of mall record stores and general merchandisers like K-Mart. By early 1984, the venerable 8-track had completely vanished.

In recent years, there has been a movement to resurrect the vinyl record. I’ve noticed no similar trend aimed at bringing back the 8-track. At this point, in the early- to mid-2020s, I may be the only person left on the planet who still fondly remembers this bygone musical medium.

-ET