Celebrating "Read an eBook Week" - Finding eBooks

As I was reviewing my Reader, I noticed that two of my favorite eBooks were not there ... Isabella Lucy Bird Bishop's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. (Turns out they were on an older Rocket Book.) So I went searching for them and ran into the Google Books collection. It turns out that classics like these are available for download in either a PDF or an epub format. Great.

This discovery led me to track down some other eBooks, and a slight download orgy ... reminds me of my first visit to Tower Records on Mass Avenue. :). Acquired were several books by Lafcadio Hearn (which I've read as "book" books), Zadock Thompson (which I didn't know existed), and my very first ebook ... Nathan Perkin's A narrative of a tour through the state of Vermont from April 27 to June 12, 1789.

Wrinkles.

Finding Zadock Thompson's History of Vermont: natural, civil, and statistical, in three parts was somewhat of a surprise. It points out one of the peculiarities of books ... the text is usually in two column on a page, is interspersed with tables, diagrams, charts, illustrations, and it's hugh! Google Books has this available as a 260 Mb or so PDF file. Not sure I want to try it on my Reader, but will definitely try it on my iPad.

The ease of finding Google Books points ou the peculiarities of book stores ... Apple is going to have a challenge matching the ease of use of Amazon and Google. Add Kurzweil's Blio reader software to the mix, and we're in for "interoperability" fun.

Celebrating "Read an eBook Week" - Firing up my trusty Reader

The bulk of Monday's work was ebook maintenance.

The battery on my Sony 505 had expired again, so recharging the battery was the first thing.

While doing that, I had decided to download the book I had selected to read - Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe. No particular reason except that it seemed like a nice break from Kokoro (more on that later, since I now realize it was also an ebook or two!) both in setting and time.

But I lucked out.

Eastern Standard Tribe, http://craphound.com/est/, besides being available in a wide variety of etext formats ... from plain text to epub to tiny jpeg images suitable for an ipodish book ... it comes with a couple of bonus chapters ... a text interview with a German magazine and an mp3 version of the interview also, not to mention a website / blog. The only thing missing seems to be a manga version ... :)

So I downloaded the epub version (339 KB) and the text version (305 KB).

While waiting for my Sony Reader to charge, I also scouted around for something else, and fount two short stories that sounded like fun, Kurt Vonnegut's 2 B R 0 2 B and Doctorow's I, Row-Boat.

When it had charged, I connected it to my MacBook and went about getting the books into the Reader. Halfway through the process, the Reader software says it needs to to update itself, so I said ... OK. And then immediately get error messages about my device being unplugged, maybe files were lost, etc ...

Luckily (!!) all of that was mainly sloppy programming work, the reader was fine. But since the reader itself is slow, the Mac software is slow, and the whole process is unnecessarily gruesome. It's easy to see why the Kindle has succeed when the Reader has not - the simple act of getting a book ready to read should indeed be simple.

So anyway, the Reader is loaded, and I'm my reading way.

Celebrating "Read an eBook Week".

On Sunday, I ran into an announcement celebrating March 7 th through March 13 th and "Read an eBook Week" (http://ebookweek.com/). Since this is Spring Break week at the University and I just finished reading Soseki's Kokoro, I though this would a fun mini project. (In the back of my mind, of course, are the coming adventures of the iPad, and I thought it would be good to brush up my classical ebook skills.

Alas, my calendar runs from Monday through Sunday, so I'll shift the celebration and my notes a bit :).