eBook dilemnas
Dec. 17th, 2010 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupAs this most recent adventure with Amazon reminded us, anything with DRM is a rental, not a purchase. But they charge you like it's a purchase, whereas their competitor, the library, charges me nothing in monetary form and only a modest amount in time form. So the Kindle really lost that battle.
But... it's Christmas vacation time, and with that the challenge to 1. time book arrivals at the library such that I get them before I leave 2. but not so early that they're due back before I am and then 3. fit them all in my luggage without hurting myself 4. without running out of reading material during the trip or 5. having so many excess books I feel the space and/or spinal compression issues weren't worth it. Given the number of books I discard without finishing for quality issues, this is a near-guaranteed failure. Dead tree books still have the advantage of free, so they're just squeaking over the Kindle, if you give the it the benefit of a doubt that I could determine whether I wanted to finish a book within the free sample range, which isn't guaranteed. Plus I worry about having nice things, because nice things can got lost or stolen or scratched and then I feel bad, whereas I could pretty much write off that time I left Among The Shadows on top of my car overnight and it rained.
But... eBook reader is not synonymous with Kindle, and free is not synonymous with dead tree or library. The Nook is capable of ePub books, which is the format of Overdrive, the ebook database my library subscribes to. My guess from browsing and vague recollections from previous searches is that only a fraction of books I want to read could be be gotten for free on the Nook, but if I'm only using it for trips, that might be enough. Plus, the Nook can read PDFs, the primary format of free things.
The cheapest Nook is $150, which is probably just about worth it, if it alleviates the queueing-books-for-trips problem. But the cheap version is wifi only, not 3G. I could just load up the thing before I left, but to keep the marginal cost at zero, but the eBook collection has the same issues with holds and due dates that the regular library has, so we're still hitting issues 1 and 2. I could fix this with the an additional $50 to buy the 3G version, but $200 seems like a lot.
So it might be time to get hardcore with my phone and see if I can either use it as a tether or to download books to an SD card and transfer them to the nook that way. I know the downloading part is possible because there is, in fact, an Overdrive app for the Droid, something would elegantly solve all five problems for free at the slight cost of headaches, potential long term eye damage, and maybe leaving me with a dead phone battery as I'm running from a serial killer. Not that this is keeping me from downloading a test book just to try it. But it can be set to download to an SD card, and if I that card doesn't require reformatting to be read by the Nook, that solves my problem.
But... it's Christmas vacation time, and with that the challenge to 1. time book arrivals at the library such that I get them before I leave 2. but not so early that they're due back before I am and then 3. fit them all in my luggage without hurting myself 4. without running out of reading material during the trip or 5. having so many excess books I feel the space and/or spinal compression issues weren't worth it. Given the number of books I discard without finishing for quality issues, this is a near-guaranteed failure. Dead tree books still have the advantage of free, so they're just squeaking over the Kindle, if you give the it the benefit of a doubt that I could determine whether I wanted to finish a book within the free sample range, which isn't guaranteed. Plus I worry about having nice things, because nice things can got lost or stolen or scratched and then I feel bad, whereas I could pretty much write off that time I left Among The Shadows on top of my car overnight and it rained.
But... eBook reader is not synonymous with Kindle, and free is not synonymous with dead tree or library. The Nook is capable of ePub books, which is the format of Overdrive, the ebook database my library subscribes to. My guess from browsing and vague recollections from previous searches is that only a fraction of books I want to read could be be gotten for free on the Nook, but if I'm only using it for trips, that might be enough. Plus, the Nook can read PDFs, the primary format of free things.
The cheapest Nook is $150, which is probably just about worth it, if it alleviates the queueing-books-for-trips problem. But the cheap version is wifi only, not 3G. I could just load up the thing before I left, but to keep the marginal cost at zero, but the eBook collection has the same issues with holds and due dates that the regular library has, so we're still hitting issues 1 and 2. I could fix this with the an additional $50 to buy the 3G version, but $200 seems like a lot.
So it might be time to get hardcore with my phone and see if I can either use it as a tether or to download books to an SD card and transfer them to the nook that way. I know the downloading part is possible because there is, in fact, an Overdrive app for the Droid, something would elegantly solve all five problems for free at the slight cost of headaches, potential long term eye damage, and maybe leaving me with a dead phone battery as I'm running from a serial killer. Not that this is keeping me from downloading a test book just to try it. But it can be set to download to an SD card, and if I that card doesn't require reformatting to be read by the Nook, that solves my problem.
