talking about the e-volution

OK that was a corny title.  I'm really really really tired.  My chops for sleep-deprivation have gone down in the last year or so since I finished breastfeeding my littlest, and I've gotten accustomed to about 7 hours a night.  But last night two of them came in our bed in the middle of the night.  Steve found himself turfed out of the bed by munchkin invaders at 3 am.  He shambled off to sleep elsewhere but I couldn't get back to sleep because they were kicking me so much.  I used to do without sleep routinely but I seem to be slipping, because I feel ded today.

In between this and that I've been thinking about e-books.  Linda Nagata has a great blog series on the nuts and bolts of how she put together her e-books, and I'm wondering if I have the nerve to try.  One problem is the fact that there are so many formats and options, and I'm intimidated by all that--although LInda does lay our her method really clearly.  My other problem is that I don't have digital versions of any of my older titles.  In fact, I don't even have paper versions of most of them.  So I'd be faced with acquiring and re-typing my own books.

The problem of this is partly the sheer work of it and partly the fact that I wouldn't be able to type them as written.  I'd start fiddling and poking and pretty soon I'd be ripping them apart and rewriting--that's not a place I want to go anywhere near.  I've thought of maybe finding a scanning service to do them, and then just go through and clean it up.  But it's definitely going to be a case of psyching myself up.  I have several short stories that I've been meaning to put on my website for a year, but just haven't managed to overcome the scanning/correcting process even for them.  What makes me think I can tackle several novels?

I do sort of have a sad feeling, though, when I think of all that work I did and now the books are out of print.  It feels like I should be able to get my act together to at least put them up in some form.  Fairer to them, if not necessarily lucrative to me.

Well, it's probably not gonna happen particularly soon with all the running around I have to do.  But I still have an itchy feeling about it.