One afternoon, while sifting through the morass of posts on Ed's Corner I realized that I had a lot of material here. Enough to make a small book on Russian Watches, at least. So, after mulling it over for a while, I decided to put my new iPad to work and start writing. (No, it isn't the shiny new iPad 2. It is the original version that I got when Apple announced their new toy. They reduced the price on the original iPad and, for $350 refurbished, that seemed like a pretty good deal). Marking Time is the result of this effort. The book consists of all the Russian watch reviews that are scattered throughout six years of posts on Ed's Corner. Additionally, an introductory secton discussing watch collecting generally and how the Russians fit into things has been added along with a section on Russian watch movements that I have personally owned, used and abused over the years.
The book costs $.99 which I hope is not considered outrageous. ISBN numbers have to bought to make a book that will actually get listed by Amazon, iBookstore and ipub vendors like Smashwords so I hope no one is terribly put off by my asking for a few dollars.
At the moment, Marking Time is available from Amazon.com as a Kindle e-book. It is illustrated with a number images that I have taken of my Vostoks, Poljots, Raketas and others. Any device with Kindle reader capability (the Kindle itself, the iPhone/iPod/iPad, Droid devices, Windows PCs and Macs) should work fine. It should eventually be available from a variety of other epub vendors but, for whatever reason, they seem to be taking their time with things. For the record, the book is not DRM protected. I think it is wrong to restrict a reader that way so there's a bit of an honor system involved too.
I hope that someone finds this work to be of interest. There aren't a lot of compiled resources for Russian watch collectors available. If I've done what I set out to do, a reader of Marking Time should be able to approach Russian watch collecting with some good background information at hand.
The book is available at this link.
