Thank you everyone for the wonderful birthday wishes!
In the end, it wound up being a decent day. Watched football with PB all day (not my cup of tea, but it’s great cuddle time!), picked up Short Stuff from her dad, she opened her presents, went out to dinner at my favorite Italian (if you can call it that) chain restaurant, and played a few rounds of Sequence before heading off to bed with a book. A nice family evening.
In my last post, I said that I was getting no presents. That was somewhat true. My MIL sent me a gift card for the dinner (we wouldn’t have gone otherwise). Also, my present from PB and Short Stuff is being delayed until we’re in the 2nd trimester of a healthy pregnancy with enough money to cover a few more rounds of IF treatment (should we find ourselves back where we are now). Also, what I wanted is a bit pricey (for what we normally spend on birthdays), so it would have been money in a savings account until I’ve saved the rest anyhow.
Right now, I believe it’s going to be a Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader. I’ve been looking at and debating over e-readers ever since the development of Amazon’s Kindle was released a few years back. I wanted it then, but PB made me wait because we don’t buy “firsts” around here.
Firsts have bugs that have to be worked out. Firsts have no competition so they rake you over the coals. Firsts don’t have the best functionality. Plus, I love, love, love being surrounded by actual books. I like the way they feel, the way they smell, the way they look. Books are my thing (I think maybe I should have been a librarian?). Moving away from books made of paper…a hard thing for me to do. Plus, I read in the tub a LOT…though I’ve never dropped a book in there, and it wouldn’t fare any better than the e-reader would (but a heck of a lot cheaper to replace!). Anyway, the Kindle is proprietary even today (boo on Amazon!), I can’t stand the physical keypad at the bottom, the battery cannot be replaced by the user, and there is no expansion slot for more memory. Oh, and no WiFi, just 3G wireless.
The Nook is produced by my favorite bookstore, pricing is competitive for the unit and the books, and it has some really great features that I much prefer over the Kindle (replaceable battery, memory expansion, color display, touch screen keyboard, lending feature [beta at the moment], and it’s not proprietary so I can download books from Google, Sony, etc.). Still, it’s a “first”. And the first release was a little klugey. Performance wasn’t great in terms of page-flipping. Even after the first firmware update, it’s still slower than all the others. But now it’s barely noticeable. So, I think (though I’m not sure) that I’m going to get one.
What’s holding me back is the whole “first” thing, the fact that I’ve heard rumors that ad placement may become standard to make up for the publisher’s losses ($25 print book or $10 e-book – their profits are obviously affected), and the fact that not enough libraries are on board meaning I have to buy more books every year than I normally would. Yes, I’ll pay less for those books, and they will be more eco-friendly because they are “content”, not physcially reproduced, but utilizing the library is also pretty darn eco-friendly, and pocketbook friendly. I’d be forking out for the e-reader (money out of my book budget), and then having to buy more (admittedly cheaper) books than I would normally. So, I don’t know. I want one. It’s neato and pretty and gadgety and much easier to hold than an actual 800pg book, but…we’ll see if my passion for it wanes by the time I actually have to spend the money.
I haven’t seen the Nook, but I’ve had a Sony Reader for over a year now, and I LOVE it. It never will replace books for me – books are old friends, furniture, objects that you can love and cherish. Also, I too love to read in the bath, and the steam wouldn’t do an e-reader any good at all, even if you don’t drop it in. And if you want to flick through to find a particular passage, or to remind yourself who some character is whose name you don’t recognise, it’s a little unwieldy – a search facility would be a useful addition.
But I always have my Reader in my handbag, and it means I’m never short of something to read at those odd moments when travelling, waiting for a bus, waiting for an appointment at the IVF clinic, etc. The Sony comes with 100 free books, all of which are classics, and as well as two or three e-book formats it can also read pdf files. I even used it while teaching once – I downloaded the pdf of the text I needed and bookmarked all the pages that I was going to refer to. Battery life is fantastic, and because the screen isn’t backlit it’s very easy on the eye and can be viewed in bright sunlight, unlike an LCD screen.
I tend to read classics on mine, and I also load onto it whatever my book club happens to be reading at the moment. DH and I are both members of the book club, and I must admit having an electronic and a paper version of the book is quite handy. Sites like the Gutenberg project are great, as you can download free of charge any book that’s out of copyright. I’m loving getting to know Dickens, Jane Austen, etc better, after being slightly put off them by being introduced to them too young at school.
Sorry, getting a bit evangelical here – I’m glad you had a happy birthday, and hope you enjoy your reader when you eventually get it… x
All the free classics. Yes, I love that as well, and I was one of those sicko’s in high school who couldn’t decide between being an English Lit professor or a French professor, so Austen is my favorite. Dickens is quite wonderful as well, but I find, these days, I have such heaviness in my mind that the lightness of modern works (literature? mostly not) is much more relaxing. Still, that is a huge bonus with moving to a reader. I have gobs of the classics in print, but to know I could have them on the reader straight away, is a wonderful thing.
And evangelical…when it comes to books, that is the perfect word. We’re in the same club. 🙂