Week 9: Thing 22

I've tinkered with ebooks before, and I'm afraid I'm still an ebook Luddite. First of all, I understand that there are a million books online thanks to the Gutenberg Project, but I still had a hard time finding books from their selection that I'd choose to read. It did give me an appreciation of how many books there are in existence and what a small percentage of them are actually appealing to me. I did choose to download The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, which my friend's book club is reading, but the format was awful. I suppose I could edit the type size & font, which is a nice feature, but again I don't think I like reading that much text on my computer.

I do enjoy audio books, and I listen to books all the time while commuting to work. Perhaps downloading an audio book to my laptop would let me listen as I'm working around the house. It seems like more work to download one and burn it to a CD when I can just get it from the library, however. There's my Luddite side coming out again.

I've read about all of the interest in the Kindle, and I'm amazed that so many people are willing to pay $369 for one. I don't think I'm there yet, but now I'd like to try one out. I've recently read about some sort of plastic-y sheets that have the feel of paper which can be loaded with ebooks, wirelessly. So periodically you can put your fake book next to your computer and it will have a newly uploaded book on it for you to pick up and read. That sounds intriguing. I did try Daily Lit which seems like a lot of fun, but I'll have to see how readable that amount of a book will be for me. So for now, I know more of these resources are becoming available, and I'll try one out when it looks good. I appreciate the exposure to these new technologies, once again.