This week I referred my first customer to downloadable books on Kindle, gulp.

Yes, I have a bookstore with over 1000 books I'd like to sell, but how could I refuse? The person in question needed a paperless option. And so the age old dilemma: is service at odds with business? The longer I live, the more strongly I believe what I told all those teachers that argued there is only one right answer to those multiple choice questions - rarely do things boil down to dichotomies, we just have to see the truth in each side and seek a solution that often reads something like "it depends".

So paper and printed form may still be around for a while, but perhaps not as prevalent. No need to toss it all out into the recycling (yet), but exploring the digital formats may be in order. By exploring, in my case, that means a knot in my stomach, opening up my search engine and typing "how to make an e-book". Alas! The world is full of people more eager than ever to share what they have learned and how you too can become an expert! Now I'm overwhelmed with even more to learn!

Of course, a distractible brain will not only think of digitizing what is already comfortable like a book, but ask questions like: what about video of story readings? Audio-books? Downloadable stories for bedtime? And on and on.  Stop. Time to run a test. If all goes well, there will be an image below of some wonderful cover art created by Cinda Logerwell from Corvallis, Oregon  for a CD with oral stories read by various community members. The first story of 'Abdu'l-Baha is read by Lorri Hendon, from Philomath, Oregon. The story comes from the book "Stories of 'Abdu'l-Baha" by Jacqueline Mehrabi.

Click on the image to listen to a story. Cross your fingers! Hope it works!