Would a book-lover descend to an e-Reader? Is the paperless library here?
The short answer is “Yes!” …
I’m a road warrior and books are great company. But I’ve been reading avidly since Dr Who’s companion was his granddaughter and Kemlo dreamed of being a Space Cadet; I like to think I’ve read everything worth reading in speculative fiction and have no patience with second-rate stuff. That means I have to carry several books so I always have one to replace the one I’ve either finished or tossed.
I’m also a geek and have been chasing the paperless office for years. (I have largely achieved it now, some twenty years after starting the chase.) I’ve noticed that, with an iPod, I miss neither the vinyl album sleeves, nor the display rows of CDs. Nor do I miss browsing for records in shops that pound music-like noise through my skull: cruising iTunes – from the comfort of my armchair, with a decent beer – is altogether more pleasant. So, while I love the feel of books and the bookshop browsing experience, would I really miss them if I brought my reading into the modern age, alongside my music listening? Was it time for my library to go paperless? I decided to find out by purchasing an e-Reader.
The question was – which one? At that time I had the Sony, Kindle or Cool-ER to choose from. I soon realized that before you select an e-reader, you select a website to buy e-books from, because they won’t all work with all e-book shops.
Cool-ER got itself eliminated first and fast, because of its daft website. It asks you what kind of e-reader you have – but instead of showing you only the e-books your e-reader can e-read, it shows you e-everything. When you click on a tasty title, it more often than not tells you that you can’t have it in your e-format. The site seemed to have been designed without booklovers or respect for their time in mind.
I’ve enjoyed Amazon for some while, a well-organized site that delivers books I simply cannot find in my local bookshops. But the Kindle needs its own wireless connection through some kind of special mobile phone account (why not use the iTunes model and download via a PC?) and it’s tied to Amazon – and Amazon are tied to the Kindle, supplying only the Kindle e-book format and not open formats such as EPUB. I don’t want to support Amazon’s monopoly building, so Kindle was eliminated.
Which left Sony. (The Elonex wasn’t around at that time.) It would work with a freely-available format, Adobe’s EPUB, and e-books are available from both Waterstone’s and W H Smith. (Borders supported it too, until their sad demise.) There seemed to be a reasonable selection of e-books available, including many I had not read. Also, Sony understand consumer electronics well, and Adobe are masters in electronic publishing, not to mention the digital rights management that Sony screwed up so memorably with the CDs and their infamous root kits. Between them, I thought, Sony and Adobe ought to have the industrial and financial muscle to give the Kindle a good run for its money. So, I would purchase a Sony.
The choice was the Pocket or the Touch, and I went for the latter mostly because it comes with an Oxford English Dictionary and, with its stylus, the ergonomics are more comfortable.
I love it. It’s far more compact in the suitcase than the four or five books I would otherwise be carrying, and it seems capable of storing the equivalent of the British Library and the Library of Congress combined if you go for the optional SD memory expansion. This means I can carry a book I may or may not read, as well as a couple I’m sure of.
(In fact, the Sony e-Reader is responsible for my having read “The Book Thief” – along with my daughter, who recommended I read it: while her recommendations are invariably good, I really did not feel like reading about a young girl growing up with the Nazis, for I most usually read to escape the real world. But once I dipped into it, secure in the knowledge that I could always turn to something less challenging, I couldn’t put it down.)
The e-ink is contrasty, comfortable to read, although I do find the light (in the optional leather case) necessary in all but the most well-lit of places. It only takes power when you flip the page, so the battery lasts forever – well, several days at least. It keeps track of where I am in each book, so I can have several reads on the go at once and pick up with whichever one matches my mood.
The only disappointment is that, while it handles the EPUB format well, pdf leaves much to be desired because, if you make the font large enough to read, it tends to scramble the page layout: losing line feeds between dialogue delivered by different characters makes it almost impossible to follow. So I’m careful to only purchase EPUB format books, and don’t bother with pdf’s.
That aside, I love the thing. Not only does it stay slim and almost weightless no matter how many books I pack, it doesn’t snap shut when I set it on the table alongside my dinner and, with the aid of its light, I can read in the warm glow of the lamps in a cosy pub. I am unlikely to be returning from my paperless library any time soon.
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