the elibrary revisited, revisited

[jazzfish]

I seem to be on the verge of acquiring an ereader. Okay, so it's really an iPad mini and a keyboard/cover, and it'll double as a portable writing device (I hope; not entirely sure how well I'll do on the tiny keyboard), but still.

This looks like a pretty good time to get into the ebook market. Charlie Stross has rewritten and compressed his Amber-with-economics marketing-made-me-overwrite-them Merchant Princes books from six down to three; I believe his original plan called for two, but whatever. I remember enjoying the first two of those, and then I never got around to reading the rest of them. The new editions are available as ebooks but won't be in print on this side of the Atlantic until September.

In addition, a number of Samuel R. Delany's books are newly available as ebooks, including his magnum opus, Dhalgren, in a newly corrected and revised edition. The linked post also neatly exemplifies one of my objections to ebooks: you lose nearly all ability to control formatting and layout. For that you really want a PDF, but PDFs are the devil for a long list of other reasons.

Speaking of PDFs, I've also got an awful lot of RPGs that I've acquired in PDF format over the past year or two. Standard ebooks are sufficiently readable on my phone: it's a little awkward, and I'd rather have a bigger screen and thus more words on the screen, but it works. PDFs, though, especially PDFs that were originally 8x10 pages (as most RPG books), are awful on the phone. They really need something more tablet-sized.

I've also acquired a large number of comics, which I refuse to try and read on the phone and would prefer not to read on the computer. For those a tablet is pretty much ideal.

I have no intention of trying to replace my library. That is a fool's errand, especially given the number of books that will never have epub editions. I'm not sure what I'll be buying in electrons rather than paper either: some authors (Brust, Bear, etc) I want dead-tree copies of, and I don't buy all that many new books these days anyway.

I'm telling myself I'm not allowed to go buy the thing until I've finished revisions to the current story. Here's hoping that has some kind of effect.

Comments

[silmaril]

I just got Dhalgren as an (asked for) New Year's gift in paperback because it wasn't available in eBook. I would have gotten the eBook way earlier last year, otherwise. But I think that's going to be one of the books that I won't mind owning in dead tree, so probably all for the best...

[jazzfish]

Dhalgren may well turn out to be the first ebook I buy that I'd like to have in dead-tree.

(Well, second; I did just buy a fourth copy of Ursula Le Guin's Tao Te Ching so I could have an ebook of it. First that I'd like to have in dead-tree and buy in ebook instead, then.)

[rbandrews]

I started with programming books.

Well okay, that's not strictly true. I started by reading Agent to the Stars because it was free and the novelty of reading something on a tablet was still there. Then I started downloading comics, then I started buying a bunch of programming books.

Tablets and programming books go great together. You have the internet right there, and programming books are heavy, and being able to search or jump around easily is great.

At this point I don't really read novels on the tablet any more, but I don't really read novels off the tablet either; I think it has more to do with "not reading novels as a lingering side-effect of depression" than "not liking reading on a tablet."

[jazzfish]

Yeah, reference materials in general seem like the ideal use-case. Fulltext search is much harder in a dead-tree book.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Merchant Princes books are compressed to three, so much as they are combined into sort-of-omnibus volumes. Three books, but each one twice as long as the six books that were published earlier.

[jazzfish]

Argh, you're right: he mentioned that they were slightly compressed in the process but still ginormous, and I jumped from 'slightly compressed' plus the length and effort of the process all the way to 'seriously compressed.' Still, it's nice to see Author's Preferred Editions.

[elf.livejournal.com]

You might want to consider also using an e-reader to borrow books from libraries (my primary use, aside from travel). Many libraries have rather liberal policies as to whether you can get an account/card with them which expands your options a bit when some have limited selections. It's a nice way to economize and read some stuff that may not warrant your precious shelf space. And you can always buy dead tree versions later.

[jazzfish]

ooh, excellent point. After a decade in Blacksburg I got out of the habit of using the library because it rarely had what I was looking for. I badly need to get back into said habit, since the Vancouver library system is AWESOME.