eBook Blog: Three Weeks Later with the eBook Reader

Note: I'm really far behind in typing up my blog posts and a few things have changed in the past few weeks since writing this. Stay tuned; there have been developments on these described issues.

Despite having this eBook reader for almost three weeks, I find I'm still doing most of my reading in print books. I think this is happening because print is where I'm currently finding the things I really want to read. Finding material I want to read has been my biggest obstacle in using the eReader. I have to admit, there's nothing on my eBook reader that I'm dying to read and that's having an impact on how much I've been using the reader.
Today was the first day I took my eBook reader out of the house. I knew I'd have some waiting room time to kill and it fit into my purse so much better than the print book I've been reading and loving. I spent the first part of my waiting room time flipping through the various eBooks I've downloaded to find what best suited my mood. I settled finally on Walter Pater. Not quite "fun" reading but it's what I have and I've been meaning to read it for years.

In my attempts to fill up my eBook reader with reading material, I've downloaded these additional books from Project Gutenberg in the past few days: Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ruskin's Modern Painters and Pater's The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. You may notice that they're all 19th century texts, all public domain works, and all pretty canonical works. They're also all "free." We need to keep a few things in mind when we talk about "free eBooks." As Project Gutenberg reminds us, "free" is a misleading term: its "success is due to the hard work of thousands of volunteers over more than 30 years. Your donations make it possible to support these volunteers, and pay our few employees to continue the creation of free electronic texts." Having started in 1971, Project Gutenberg rightly calls themselves the first producer of free eBooks and they've set up some very admirable and innovative goals for themselves: "To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. This mission is, as much as possible, to encourage all those who are interested in making eBooks and helping to give them away." All of these factors are worth keeping in mind for my eventual ruminations on Google Books.

This week I've also downloaded "free" (thank you Jon Stewart) from my local public library, Julia Child's My Life in France. I had access to the book for one week and this morning I realized the week was over: the book appeared as "unavailable." I downloaded it in part to see how the process worked and it was as easy as buying music from iTunes. Again, the hardest part of the process was finding something I really wanted to read. The selection is still limited on the library site but I expect it will get better.

You may notice other than using the 25$ credit that came with my eBook reader, I've not actually purchased a book yet. I'm not entirely sure why this is but I suspect it's because right now Amazon is the major eBook seller (the Sony eBook store selections are still very limited) and I'm unable to read Kindle Books on my Sony Reader. Also, I'm not sure if I've got over the "if I'm going to buy a book, I'd like to have the book" hurdle. When I buy the book, I know I can loan it to someone, donate it, resell it, mail it to a friend etc. With an eBook (especially a purchased one), these things aren't possible. I know I'm not alone in my thinking on this front.

Another issue is that the cost factor hasn't made buying an eBook more enticing than buying a print book. The book I'm currently reading is a hefty hardcover. Purchased through Amazon.com, the hardcover costs $13.72 (plus shipping unless you spend 25$) and the Kindle version costs $10.99. In Canada, the Kindle version is not available. I guess the upside of me not finding eBooks that I really want to read is that it's getting me to read things I may or may not have picked up otherwise (like Child's book or Pater). I'm not sure "read stuff you'd probably not otherwise read" is a great tag line for eBooks. I expect the availability of eBooks in a range of formats is going to improve radically over the next months and years.