Dec 08 2009
Easy Reader
Here’s my first e-reader, a BeBook, bought at the beginning of this year and still going strong.
It is a re-badged Hanlin V3 (now available in Australia from a leading retailer) and it runs on Linux software (the free operating system competitor to Apple and Microsoft). The important thing for me was that it wasn’t locked to any proprietary book format.
What does that mean? Well, in case you didn’t know, there’s an international format war going on (think VHS vs Betamax) and of course the stakes are high. Here’s something about ebook formats, but for our purposes all I need to say is that I didn’t want to be buying and collecting a format that might not be transferable.
That said, I have since bought a Kindle, Amazon’s answer, and the second version (Kindle 2) does allow more open formats. In fact, there is essentially no difference as long as you use decent e-book management software. I suggest the non-commercial, open-source (and therefore free) Calibre.
Anyway, the BeBook is a simple beast. It has a clear book-sized screen, three levels of zoom (the highest changes the view from portrait to landscape), can store up to 5 bookmarks per book … and runs for over 3 weeks on 2 hours per day and that only uses half the battery (at which point I recharge overnight). With its sturdy leather cover the unit weighs the same as a small, slim hardback tree-book and holds up to 16,000 ebooks (using a 16 GB SD card).
I don’t have 16,000 books, but I do have a few. The first book I read on the machine was Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and I’ve also worked my way through some biggies like Moby Dick and the second volume of the Scott-Moncrieff translation of In Search of Lost Time, all from Project Gutenberg. And I’ve been buying books too. Of course, this is a fraught business and there’s a lot to say about who you should buy from and in what format. But I am sticking to my guns. E-books are the future. There’ll always be a place for tree-books, but their position as the dominant media for written language has probably already been toppled by the internet, and e-readers will only complete the dethroning.