Books, EBooks, and Screen Reading
December 20, 2008 – 20:37I’m an avid reader. In this Aaron and I share a hobby, we even like many of the same authors. Our biggest difference is in the fact that I rarely ever read “dead trees,” I’ve been slowly migrating my pretty extensive collection of both hardbound and paperbacks to eBooks. This is in response to Aaron’s book review articles, like this one.
Aaron on the other hand, doesn’t like to screen read, and sticks to his bulky old low tech paper texts.
I taught myself to screen read years ago, in a boring series of ISP engineering/operations jobs with a lot of dead time. Same with doing onsite backups, etc. I can pack my library with me on my notebook. And I mean my LIBRARY, all of it. EBooks take up a tiny bit of space, after all, most formats are just basically in a text markup language.
I tend to use MobiPocket reader for a variety of reasons.
- Organization: It also organizes and sorts your collection.
- Backup: Makes it really easy to backup your collection.
- Portability: Has both a version for and will send your eBooks to a variety of Palm and Windows mobile devices, and it even notices memory cards.
It’s interface is clunky, and Amazon bought them in order to use the MobiPocket format on it’s Kendall reader. It also needs to have it’s sort options overhauled, and sometimes it will have viewing issues. Oh, it also only runs on Windows.
Here’s a shot of the main library view, and to it’s right, a single column reading view in high contrast:
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Here are two shots of MobiPocket Reader on my tablet in full screen portrait, this is how I generally read, my scheme in the left. In tablet mode it’s like holding a heavy book that gets hot. 
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2 Responses to “Books, EBooks, and Screen Reading”
Those screenshots do look pretty sharp. I’d love to be able to put books and documents on something I could go sit in the recliner and read, but none of the solutions have looked right to me yet. The small ‘pocket’ readers would annoy me, since they aren’t big enough to show a whole page at once. The e-paper systems look great, especially the bigger ones like the Irex Iliad, but they’re still fairly new technology and quite expensive.
Hmm, I hadn’t thought of picking up a cheap laptop: something just powerful enough to run X and readers for the common formats. That may be the way to go.
By Aaron on Dec 21, 2008
Especially if you go with an ultra-portable with a touch screen or one of the linux tablets, they aren’t REALLY that cheap but I think you can get some of the linux ones for sub 900. I use my notebook for a lot besides reading so I could justify the expense.
By joey on Dec 21, 2008