Because geek is cool and clever

Travels in ebook land March 2, 2010

Posted by David in Comment.
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Not content with spending a measly 90 percent of my day staring at one screen or another, last week I gave into temptation and bought an ebook reader.

Wandering around Waterstones waiting for my daughter to finally settle on her choices, the four books I was clutching already feeling like a generous slice of Canadian redwood, I found myself browsing the digital reader display.

They ranged in scale from the humble glorified calculator whose primary function appeared to be aiding and abetting the Scrabble cheat, through a selection of plasticky slivers untroubled by such luxuries as robustness, up to the sleek aluminium allure of the Sony range.

By the time you get to the top models, you’re already looking at considerably more than a year’s spend on paperbacks, even for an avid reader like myself (and, of course, you still have to actually buy the paperless books to put on them).

Still, being a helpless gadget hound, I opted for the Sony PRS-600 – the ‘Touch’ edition. Despite managing to get this far in life without the need to scribble in any book I’ve ever read, suddenly note-taking was a must-have feature.

At home, with my device carefully slotted into its exorbitantly-priced leather enclosure, I set about feeding it its first meal of prose.

Unlike MP3 players, there’s no immediate way to ‘rip’ a book you already own into an ebook but I already have a collection of text and PDF files procured from travels around the internet so they would do as snacks.

The included and dreadfully unstable Sony Reader Library software was replaced by the brilliant Calibre from calibre-book.com and I effortlessly copied and converted content to the device.

Reading on the PRS-600 feels perfectly comfortable and I’ve already devoured a couple of real button pushers on it.
The only dark moment came when I actually purchased a book from WH Smith online.

Stephen Baxter’s latest cost more in digital form than its physical counterpart on Amazon and getting it onto the device required signing up for accounts, OKing agreements and generally way too much more difficulty than simply copying a PDF.

Will I ever need up to 50,000 books in my bag? No. Have I found a need to make any notes? Not yet. Are my wood pulp days behind me?

I have a feeling they probably are.