Whipped Cream Difficulties

Thursday and Friday were kind of slow days at work. For various reasons (including a series of discussions with several co-workers) I ended up downloading the Shooter app, which does run on the Kindle Fire. (I find that slightly surprising, but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.)

Since the Kindle Fire lacks GPS and Bluetooth, you do miss out on a few features, such as interfacing with the Kestrel and GPS-based weather station input. On the other hand, I think the interface on a Kindle Fire may be slightly more pleasant; since you can apparently do cloud-based syncing, what I suspect will work out well is to do data entry on the Kindle Fire, sync with Shooter on your smart phone, and use the phone at the range.

This, in turn, led to me consider .22 LR ballistics. In turn, my consideration of same led me to start poking around on Amazon for some things I’d seen previously, such as The Complete Book of the .22: A Guide to the World’s Most Popular Guns (available used at a good price) and Rifleman’s Guide To Rimfire Ammunition (a book I want, but the Amazon prices aren’t that good; I’d rather support my local gunshop).

One of the books I found while poking around is a quaint and curious volume called The Art of Rimfire Accuracy by a gentleman named Bill Calfee. From what I can tell, Mr. Calfee has forgotten more about .22 accuracy than most people ever knew; he’s somewhat famous in the community as a .22 specialist gunsmith. (One thing that particularly amuses me is that Mr. Calfee builds custom .22 benchrest guns based on the XP-100 action; when I was six years old, I thought the XP-100 was the coolest gun in the world. I still want one chambered in .221 Fireball, but a Calfee .22 conversion sounds like it would be a neat thing to own as well.)

My understanding is that the book is mostly a collection of Mr. Calfee’s writings for Precision Shooting magazine: the book is 700+ pages long.

Mr. Calfee’s book is published by Authorhouse, a POD publisher and one that seems popular in the gun community. (Authorhouse also publishes The Rifleman’s Rifle: Winchester’s Model 70, 1936-1963, a book I want badly but can’t justify the $90 price tag for.)

Anyway, here’s my point: Mr. Calfee’s book in paperback is $42.63 with Prime shipping. Interestingly, it is also available on the Kindle…

…and the Kindle edition is $9.99. I’ve only made through the first three chapters so far, but it doesn’t look to me like there’s any photographic or other detail lost on the Kindle Fire. Welcome to the future of publishing. Now if we could only get more gun books on the Kindle, like History of Smith & Wesson or The Rifleman’s Rifle or Hatcher’s Notebook or even Applied Ballistics For Long-Range Shooting, things would be hopping…

(I can even see a version of the Litz book that runs as an application, and allows you not only to read the text, but also to do ballistic calculations based on Litz’s equations interactively within the book itself, instead of using the supplied CD. Hey, a fellow can dream, can’t he?)

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2012 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Kindleing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.