Reading Is Fun With Metal
Posted on | April 23, 2008 at 11:30 pm | 2 Comments
I’m still recovering from vacation and trying to catch up on stuff around the house, so this is going to be short. I mentioned in this post that an additional problem with ebooks, or at least with the way I read ebooks from my Palm T|X PDA, is that the screen is not really made for outside viewing. This was driven home to me when trying to use it on the trip when lounging by the pool. The screen isn’t bright enough, and it also reflects too much. The glare makes it pretty much unreadable. As yellojkt mentioned in the comments to the post referenced above, the Sony eReader does not have this problem. I assume Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t either. The T|X is not optimized as an ebook reader, that’s kind of a by-product, so I can’t fault it too much.
The battery issue came into play too. Even though I recharged the PDA the morning of my flight back to the states, I think I would’ve come close to running out of charge on the 4-hour+ plane trip. Luckily, I finished reading the book halfway into the flight, so I didn’t have to worry about it. But if I had wanted to start another book…
(BTW, the book I finally finished reading was Olympos, which I’ve been working on for a long, long time, like over two years. Review soon, hopefully. I am proud of myself for finishing an entire 700-page ebook, although I do have to admit I read some of it via the old-fashioned hardback version of it.)
So, if I’m going to seriously embrace this technology, sounds like I need a serious piece of dedicated hardware. Although I still think the iPhone may make a halfway decent eReader. We’ll see.
Okay, time for beddy-bye.
Latre.
Comments
2 Responses to “Reading Is Fun With Metal”
April 23rd, 2008 @ 11:57 pm
I don’t want to plug any one site here (at least, not when I don’t get a kickback) but there really are a lot of places you can go to find interesting new portable chargers, backup power packs and whatnot. I’ve even seen a keychain-size battery that gives most phones/PDAs another hour or so of juice for under $20, and recharges from its own solar panel. There are iPhone holsters with concealed batteries that more than double its duty cycle, too.
As for e-Books, why not audiobooks on MP3 – just until they get the ideal e-reader product out the door?
April 24th, 2008 @ 6:58 pm
Y’know, InfK, every once in awhile you have a good idea…