Ficbot’s thoughts on her new Touch will appear later this afternoon. Meanwhile here are some comments from her on e-books as a godsend for small-town residents and travelers:
When I lived in NZ, there was only one bookstore in the entirety of Hamilton, and it was a teeny tiny Dymocks. Not at all very satisfying. I went to Auckland and spent two full days in the two-story Barnes and Noble because I was in such withdrawal! And then I had trouble because I did buy some books and I had to get them home with me somehow when I left the country! How nice it would have been then to have an e-book device like I have now where I could have bought any book I wanted and then had nothing to carry home! That was 2005! Isn’t it amazing how far we have come in just a few short years? Now, with my new iPod Touch, I can order the latest best-sellers off Fictionwise—from my bed!
Housekeeping: I’ve been out of action, more or less, with a nasty upper respiratory infection. – D.R.
David — get well soon!
My attitude to p-books is changing. They take up too much space and gather too much dust. Of the books on my shelves, most haven’t been opened in the past year, or even in the five years before that. As for library books, who knows where they’ve been? (He said, querulously, in Howard Hughes mode.) E-books carry no known germs, take up no space, and never need a feather duster. When you take into account Ficbot’s observations about availability, e-books are a no-brainer.
Trouble is, that’s preaching to the converted here!
Thanks, Richard. I think there’s a place for both E and P, of course, but the dust problem over here isn’t theoretical–my wife has asthma. Now the question of the day. Where’s Howard Hughes when the e-book business needs him? Excellent point about germs. Perhaps if I’d lived a Hughes lifestyle, at least on terms of germ-avoidance, I wouldn’t gotten this bug or at least others. Thanks. David
I’m being forced, against my better judgment, to take the CISSP certification. The book I have is a 1200 page monstrosity.
It came with a CD and 21MB of PDFs–the whole book, by chapter–all of which fit nicely on my Cybook Gen3. With more than enough space for the Tor free eBooks and another PDF book I’m reading (someone’s PKI Ph.D. thesis). And the PDF viewer in the new firmware is much, much better.
I can’t ask for better justification than that. I’m waiting with interest for iRex’s announcement Tuesday.