Twitter’s still everywhere…
I was just catching up on feeds in Google Reader, namely Teleread’s feed (a blog focusing on e-books), and even they had an article about Twitter! 
Actually, they had an interesting take on it:
I myself can see Twitter as a way to share enthusiasm for various
books, and in fact, if it’s here to stay, I wouldn’t be surprised to
see e-book software integrated with the service, as well as growing library adoption.
It would be cool to get book recommendations from Twitter users. Perhaps if when someone Twitters about a book they’re reading, they can tag it a certain way so that some utility could filter out those recommendations and present them all together on one webpage. That would be pretty cool… There’s already a site that aggregates the links that people are sharing over Twitter.
I know e-books aren’t all the rage right now, but I sure prefer them to paper books (most of the time) because it’s so easy to carry many of them with me on one device, like my PDA phone, my Tablet PC, or of course on the Sony Reader. Having these books with me wherever I go allows me to read whenever I’m stuck waiting in a line, or taking my lunch break at work, or whenever I am stuck waiting around in general. Helps keep up my motivation to read (With my lessening attention span, I need all the help I can get! *smirk*). I still like to buy paper books to keep around in my collection, but I prefer e-books for practical purposes.
I just posted on Twitter asking what people are reading right now. Hopefully I get some responses so I can add them to my “to read” list. I just read a couple of the short stories from Cory Doctorow’s book, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present yesterday. Cory Doctorow offers all of his novels as free downloads online in various formats, as well as selling them in dead-tree format in stores. So I put the stories from Overclocked on my Sony Reader (gotta name it sometime…). Works out well!
What books are you reading now?
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Tablet Ink on E-Ink
Tablet Ink on E-Ink – tighter crop
Originally uploaded by Jezlyn26.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the first instance of a Tablet PC ink blog post on a Sony Reader!
Check out other pictures in my Flickr set.
E-books are awesome
Ever since I got my T-Mobile MDA, I got back into the habit of reading e-books. I used to do it all the time when I carried around PDAs regularly, and it was nice to start again. I loaded eReader and redownloaded some of the e-books that I bought that I hadn’t finished reading. I get the eReader e-mail newsletter to keep up on new releases and get the discount codes, but I haven’t bought that many e-books in a while. And it’s weird, because often I’ll see a whole slew of romance novels being pimped in the newsletter…is that the main demographic of e-book readers (as in people, not devices *smirk*)?? I would think that there’d be way more sci-fi and techie kinds of books, not to be stereotypical of PDA/e-book users. I just can’t see most soccer moms toting a little PDA reading romance novels while they’re running errands or whatever! Okay, I’ll stop now, before the flames really come in.
I do wish that e-book selections were better, though. And I really wish the Harry Potter books were available as legal e-books! I admit, I have non-legal copies of the HP books that I’ve been re-reading the last few days (I wanted to refresh my memory on the storylines, since I listen to Pottercast), but I don’t feel bad about it because as far as I’m concerned, I have the dead tree versions of all the books (most in hardback form), I’ve bought the books for other people, and I’ve put lots of money into watching all the movies in the theatre and on DVD. It’s annoying that I can’t read it on my PDA because some lame publishing company doesn’t have the foresight to recognize a viable market. So I feel like the e-book versions I have fall within fair use, even though I’m relatively sure I don’t have a legal leg to stand on… *sigh* I would dump my non-legal copies in a second if eReader or anyone else would offer the HP e-books.
While we’re on the subject of e-books, I have a few things to say about the Sony Reader. I did get to see it in person finally, and I was pretty impressed by it. For a while I was really itching to buy one, but I was lurking around the Mobileread forums for both the Sony Reader and Iliad iRex (IIRC?) reader (which was more interesting with the bigger screen with touch capabilities and higher resolution) and reading people’s experiences sort of cooled me on the idea of buying the Reader (that and I had just bought my MDA, which was the same price, and could be more than an e-book reader).
I liked the hardware and the technology, despite some wonkiness in the button/menu layout and navigation. My main issue for not pushing to buy the Reader is that I’m very wary of the Sony Connect e-book store. The proprietary format that Sony is using concerns me. Sure, I could probably convert my own PDFs for reading on the Reader, but even that is kind of touch and go because of inconsistencies with the software conversion tool. Since Sony’s notorious for using closed formats, I’m worried that if the Reader doesn’t do well enough, the Connect store will languish, and I’ll have e-books that are locked to a discontinued Reader device. At least with books on eReader.com, they’re viewable on my Tablet PC and PDA, and they seem established enough that I’m not as worried (though it’s possible) that they’ll close up shop and leave me with useless files. I wish the books on Connect were PDFs or something more universal. Hopefully they thrive so that their proprietary format isn’t as limiting (ha).
Honestly, as cliche as this will sound, if Apple made an e-book reader, it would propel the e-book market. So hurry up and do it, Apple! Maybe then I’ll be able to have legal e-books of Harry Potter! *smirk* Oh, and while you’re at it, make a Tablet, too. 
Scratching that neophiliac itch again…
Yay! I’m going to see the Sony Reader in person tonight after work. I read that even though the Sony Style web store said that shipment of the Readers were delayed until mid-November, there were some brick & mortar Sony Styles that are selling them right now. Unfortunately, when I called the SS near me, the salesperson I talked to said they just sold their last one today. 
But, I can still see the demo unit in person, which I’m eager to do.
I remembered that Borders is partnering with Sony to see the Readers and gift cards to the Sony Connect e-book store, so I also called my local Borders to see if they had any. Surprisingly, the guy I talked to knew about them, and gave me some decent info. Supposedly they were going to get some in stock today, but because of the bad weather last night, many of their orders were delayed. So the guy said he expects them to be in stock in the next couple days, and that I could check back on Friday. Sweet! Incidentally, I called another local Borders and the guy I talked to had no clue about the Reader. Why don’t employees of chain stores get the same information? So annoying to get conflicting info when calling multiple stores. 
In this day & age of near-instantaneous communication, this shouldn’t be a problem.
