Foreign Perspectives

It’s been almost a month since I started using the ebook reader so I’m really getting settled into using it now.

Although it’s “only” got 1/2 GB of memory that’s proved not to be any kind of restriction at all. Frankly, I doubt that I’ll ever fill it with books that I’m actually going to read. The manual says that it’ll hold 350 books but I suspect that it’ll be more in reality for me (the number depends on the length of the book and if it’s illustrated). Although 1/2GB doesn’t sound like much in computer terms it’s an awful lot of books. To give you some idea of just how many books you’re really talking about, consider that the library in our son’s school has “only” 10,000 (about 14GB) and in terms of footage that 1/2GB is equivalent to roughly 7 shelves of books each 5 foot long.

Actually those stats make for some sad reading in some ways because I suspect that once these readers drop some more in price the day can’t be long off when libraries will cease to exist, at least in their current form. Even now, if you get one of the connected readers you can buy books directly from the reader so in theory you have access to a library of millions of books regardless of how much memory your particular reader has.

What’s it like using it though? Well, one “problem” that I’ve encountered is that I find that I read more with it than when I’m reading the equivalent “real” book. That’s starting to become a slight problem in that I’m moving further ahead of the course schedule for both the human biology and the astronomy courses that I’m doing at the moment than I was planning to. Thus it seems likely that I will complete all of the reading for the biology course around the end of this month rather than the end of the following month as per my schedule. It’s also extremely useful for the astronomy course which has a whole bunch of books amounting to a couple of inches thick in total which I can flick between as necessary, something that I just wouldn’t have done with the paper books.

Although in an ideal world I’d have a screen on the reader about A5 size rather than the A6 size that I currently have, that’s really only because of the diagrams that are in my textbooks. They are readable on the A6 screen but barely. Having said that, with an A5 size reader I wouldn’t be carrying it around all the time so I’d not get as much reading done.

Colour would definitely be nice for the textbooks and that’ll come in a few years time I expect but normal books are in black and white anyway so I suspect that colour isn’t really a big deal for many people using the readers at the moment.

Availability of books hasn’t been an issue for me as yet though there seem to be a lot of ebooks available these days and the number will only increase over time. There are loads of classics available free too although if you’re really keen you can buy these too (they’re the ones sitting at the lower end of the price range usually). In practical terms, you can get a fairly sizeable chunk of ex-copyright (ie older than 75 years) books ranging from Shakespeare to the popular books of the 1930s (and some later ones too) free. That includes such things as the massive Webster dictionary of 1910, the Encyclopedia Britannica of the same vintage (though not called that for copyright reasons) and a whole bunch of stuff that sounds really impressive to have on your reader. Included amongst that is the “5 foot bookshelf” of classics which dates from the early 1900s and from whence I did my shelf calculations above.

If you’re flicking through the demo readers in the shop you might think that the slow screen refresh rate is just way too slow. However, it actually seems to work out at close to the speed at which you’d be able to turn a page in a normal book and it’s best to think of it in those terms. You might flick through computer screens fairly quickly but you don’t do that with books, do you? The only downside of that is that video obviously isn’t possible so science-fiction style animated books aren’t a runner with the current generation of readers but wait a few years and they’ll turn up.

One not so obvious point is that people don’t know what you’re reading. So, the OH has the impression that I’m constantly reading the textbooks which is good in some ways, although not so good in that she thinks I’m totally obsessed with the courses.

Definitely a very worthwhile thing to get.