Longtime readers of this here blog know that I’m a big advocate of eBooks. I like being able to read books anywhere without having to lug a big wad of paper around. eReader on my Palm T|X PDA was very useful, especially while on vacation. There are also eBook readers for the iPhone – how do they measure up? On my vacation last weekend, I was able to give the iPhone a thorough testing in this department.

Even though I installed eReader on my iPhone a long time ago, I couldn’t really use it initially. In the beginning, there was no way of getting the DRM-protected eReader-format eBooks I bought for my Palm PDA from the Palm eBook website onto the iPhone and readable by the iPhone’s eReader. That recently changed. The eReader website now has a “Personal Content” area, where you can upload eBooks acquired from other vendors and then download them to the iPhone. You then unlock the content using the same unlock code needed to read them on the Palm. Very handy. I stored all my eBooks in the web library and then downloaded them to the eReader application in the iPhone with no problem.

Besides eReader, there’s another eBook reader for the iPhone called Stanza. Stanza lets you acquire eBooks from a number of different sources. The main one is the Fictionwise website, which also has a Personal Content area where you can upload your eBooks acquired from other vendors and download them back into the iPhone. So I did that again with my eReader-format books and downloaded them back to the iPhone where I could read them with Stanza. Yes, this means that I have multiple copies of the books in the phone, but they don’t take up much space.

So anyway, I took the time during the vacation to read some chapters from A Feast For Crows, which I’ve been working on since my Pennsylvania vacation last June. Both eReader and Stanza compare favorably to eReader on the Palm, but I’m giving the nod to Stanza. It has far more settings than eReader, including the ability to change the foreground and background colors (I prefer white text on a blue background to the default black on white) and a much greater variety of fonts and font sizes. It’s kind of strange that iPhone eReader doesn’t have those abilities, since the version on the Palm does. Stanza also seems to be faster with loading and reformatting the book.

The Palm T|X screen is about the same size as the iPhone screen, so at my preferred text-viewing size, I get about the same amount of words on a single screen for both. Which of course means a lot of page turning, especially if you’re a fast reader. On both eReader and Stanza, you can turn the page by either tapping or doing the “swipe” gesture, but only Stanza lets you do either one at the same time. This also means you have to learn the art of tapping “differently” when you want to get the settings menu on Stanza rather than wanting to turn the page. The iPhone screen is clear and bright enough to read in almost any light, from full to darkness, although I don’t think I tried actually reading outside in sunlight. As I’ve probably mentioned before, one place eBooks come in handy is when you want to read in bed while your significant other wants to sleep, especially if the SO is disturbed by any type of light including a book light. The iPhone emits so little light that that’s not a problem. Even the gentle tap or swipe of a page turn is less audible than the actual page turning of a paper book.

So, thumbs up on the iPhone eBook experience. Both eReader and Stanza work fine, but I go with Stanza because of its greater range of options and ability to read more eBook formats. Both are free in the App Store.

Of course, if you do have the paper version of the book handy and don’t have to read in the dark, then by all means read the paper one. I did take the actual Feast For Crows paperback with me to Estes Park and used that whenever I could. Yes, I must admit there’s nothing like the feel of a real book in your hands. But it’s good to know I have an alternative.

The funny thing is that there are so many other diversions on the iPhone that if I’m alone waiting some where, I end up not automatically defaulting to reading eBooks like I did with the Palm on hand. Oh the wonders of being infinitely tethered to the Internet.

Latre.

Pet Peeve of the Day: They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t cure the common cold.

Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “save me subtitles”.

Videogame(s) Played Since Last Blog Update: Lots of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS)

Some interesting news lately out of Hollywood on the progress of two highly anticipated (by me anyway) possible future HBO shows. Since both of these projects were first announced, there’s been a regime change at HBO which made it look unlikely (according to some people) that either project would see the light of day.

The first one was the proposed adaption of the Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon 66-issue comic book series Preacher, one of the most blasphemous and graphically violent works ever committed to the four-color page. Also, one of the most exciting, funny, and enthralling. The HBO series was to be overseen by Mark Steven Johnson, director of the Daredevil and Ghost Rider movies. Seeing as how average those turned out, I wasn’t entirely looking forward to seeing what he would do with edgier fare. (Let’s not even mention what he did to A Prayer For Owen Meany.) But in interviews, he said he was going to stay faithful to the comics, even going so far as to adapt each individual issue into a separate episode of the TV series. That had a lot of potential. And as such, it was ultimately shot down by the HBO brass.

But recently comes word that it will be adapted instead into a feature film. A previous try at that in the 90s, to have been directed by Tank Girl director Rachel Talalay, er…. tanked. Thankfully. The director of this new version is going to be Sam Mendes, Oscar-winning director of American Beauty and also director of the upcoming Oscar-bait movie Revolutionary Road, which reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. He has previously directed another comic book adaption, Road To Perdition, which was critically acclaimed but didn’t fare that well at the box office. So he does know his way around a graphic novel and he is a great director. This should prove interesting. I just wonder how much of the story he’s going to adapt for the movie. It’s a looong story, and the first part of it (collected as Gone To Texas) is not really as interesting as the rest of it. So I don’t know how well it would turn out if he just did that initial storyline. But I can’t wait to see who’s going to play super-powered preacher Jesse, his ex-girlfriend hitwoman Tulip, and Irish vampire Cassidy.

Around the same time that the HBO Preacher thing was initially bandied about, HBO also announced they were developing an adaption of George R.R. Martin’s seminal fantasy series A Song Of Ice And Fire. And then… nothing. Even though Martin said the project was still rattling around at HBO, no concrete confirmations of movement have been forthcoming and I assumed it was another victim of the leadership change at HBO. But I guess that HBO is now getting serious about this genre stuff due to the success of True Blood (That’s a success? Even though I like it, I thought the ratings numbers were down compared to past HBO successes. I guess the numbers have inched up lately.) So HBO has actually greenlit a pilot for the series. This is no guarantee that the show will make it to air, but it’s certainly an encouraging sign.

Even though the book series is unfinished and I’m only halfway through the most recent book, A Feast For Crows, I declare this series to be the best fantasy books ever written. Or at least the best I’ve read. And like the HBO press releases say, it’s a natural fit for pay cable. It’s more about the (twenty million) characters than the battles, magic, and creatures. (In fact, there’s very little of those last two in the books at all.) So the budget should be doable. And since there’s a lot of sex and violence, it’s not the kind of thing you’d want to see on say the SciFi Channel or in weekend syndication. A feature film would definitely not be able to tell even a fraction of the story (which, admittedly, does seem to wander a bit at times). They are talking about adapting the series as one book per TV season, which sounds about right. Even at that pace though, they’ll have to cut out a lot of ancillary characters and story. And it’s the perfect vehicle for big stars who may want to dabble in the genre and then be gone, since no character is ever safe in Martin’s universe.

So, I’m holding my breath. After what HBO did to Deadwood, Rome, Carnivàle, and John From Cincinnati, I’m a little worried about the whole story getting told once it gets started. But I’m willing to take that chance.

Latre.

Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “speed dial worry about misdialing”.

Pennsylvania has strange beer laws. You can’t buy beer in grocery stores or liquor stores (!), but you can buy it at convenience stores and “beer distributors”. Also, I think you can buy six packs in bars to take home.

Buses to Atlantic City show schmaltzy movies. On the way down, we saw Martian Child. I didn’t know it was based on a book by David Gerrold, he of “The Trouble With Tribbles” fame. I didn’t totally buy John Cusack as the science fiction writer/widower who had a hankering to be a single parent and adopt a difficult child, but at least it was somewhat entertaining if predictable. Amanda Peet’s role should’ve been bigger. On the way back, we saw August Rush, which would make an especially good flick for the MST3K people to mock. N and I had our own little two-person Greek chorus commenting upon the escalating preposterousness of the plot, but we couldn’t get anyone else to join in. I realize it’s supposed to be a contemporary fantasy or something, but there’s only so much I can take. It almost has to be seen just to take in the spectacle that is Robin Williams-as-Bono-as-Fagan. And how did an 11-year old prodigy with no family and no money get into Julliard? Thankfully they didn’t even try to explain it. And there are so many coincidences in this movie, it makes your head spin.

They have some good BBQ in PA. It ain’t just in the South!

I like assigned seating on planes. I don’t want to have to try to find my own seat once I get on the plane. This was my first trip on Southwest Airlines (N’s also), and we weren’t sure how the seating worked. Because of a driving miscalculation, we got to DIA later than we would’ve liked, and ended up getting put into the final boarding group for the plane. So of course we didn’t get to sit together. But on the flight back, I got to the airport really early and got a pretty high boarding number again. The only thing I can figure is that most people did online check-in and printed out their boarding passes from home. I didn’t have that luxury, not being near the Internet (or at least the Internet and a printer). What’s the whole point of the choose-your-own-seat thing anyway? How does it save Southwest money?

I like flying into Philadelphia a whole lot better than flying into Newark. The drive to the Land of Dundler-Mifflin is a bit longer, but it’s a lot easier. The Philadelphia airport had some oddities (especially the cramped security lines), but I liked it better than Newark.

I like getting a foreign rental car. This year I got a Toyota Corolla, which was a nice change from the omnipresent Chevy Aveo. It felt more like driving my Prius.

Part of me still prefers normal books to ebooks. I took A Feast For Crows with me to read on the trip, in both paperback and ebook form. I almost exclusively read the paperback instead of the ebook, even though it’s huge (almost 1000 pages, of which I read a third on the trip). The only time I used the ebook was in low-light situations.

Gambling would be a lot more fun if there wasn’t all that money-losing involved. Atlantic City was a lot less crowded than last year – I think the economy has hit the gamblers pretty hard. Or at least the ones who go to Atlantic City.

People still don’t know how to set widescreen TVs properly. The hotel in A.C. had a huge widescreen LCD HDTV. It was not actually setup to show HDTV content (as far as I could tell), even though it was definitely receiving HD channels. The display mode was set to “stretch” for everything. There was no way to change it – the TV controls were disabled. At one point, there was 4:3 content showing on one of the network stations that had the proper bars on the side, but the rest of the time everything was off. It was very cool having that big, wide TV, but it would’ve been cooler if it had been setup properly.

Cabbies outside the A.C. casino/hotel like to loudly argue with each other all night and all day. Or maybe they were just having very spirited discussions, which also involved a lot of bodily contact that I was interpreting as “friendly shoving”.

I take a lot of things on trips that I never actually end up using. For example, I took both my Nintendo DS and my Sony PSP, but only played the PSP. And that was just for a little while. I also brought one of my iPods and didn’t use it at all. At least I did go through most of my clothes.

I don’t like heat and humidity and could never live out there. Oh wait, I already knew that one. I do like all the greenery though – I miss that in the west.

Latre.

Ilium follows three major plotlines that seem separate but start to mingle towards the end. The first is about these pesudo-Greek gods on the planet Mars recreating the Trojan War, which is monitored by an old human scholar that they’ve resurrected for that purpose. His job is to note where the war re-creation diverges from Homer’s Iliad. The second plotline is about a group of lazy, decadent humans on Earth who have forgotten how to use their technology and are waited on hand and foot. Predictably, the life they know is shattered and they have to learn to be independent and fight for their lives. The third plotline follows a group of robots out in the moons of Jupiter who detect something weird going on back on Earth which they decide to investigate. The narrative for that plotline is mostly through two very different robot friends who spend their time arguing about the merits of Shakespeare vs Proust. Also predictably, the robots are the most human characters in the book, at least in the beginning.

Ilium is rousing high adventure with plot twists galore. It starts off a little slow but becomes a page-turner after a short time. There comes a point where the scholar tasked with observing the neo-Trojan War decides to take matters into his own hands and change the outcome. That’s where the story really starts to get interesting. There are some great character arcs and it’s fun seeing how all the various plotlines eventually touch upon each other. The only problem I had with it is the constant literary references, which is a Simmons trademark (I also read Hyperion and its sequel). I could do with a little less of the robots discussing their literary heroes and a little more action. And though I enjoyed reading the Iliad when I was in college, there’s only so much I can take of the endless lists of soldiers and who they’re fighting and how they died. There’s enough characters in the book without trying to remember who Greek soldier #64 was and what he did to Trojan #213. But luckily, that doesn’t take up too much of the book either.

The book ends on some cliffhangers, so I was really anxious to start the sequel right after it. I even bought the hardback of Olympos, which was the only edition out at the time (followed shortly by the ebook). But sadly, the conclusion didn’t live up to the build-up. I’m not even sure exactly why, as it wasn’t that different from the first book. There was still a lot of high adventure and action. People were put in jeopardy all the time, only to be rescued at the last minute. There were still a lot of literary references (chiefly, characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest take center stage for much of the book), but that didn’t get too out of hand. I didn’t particularly like the explanation for everything that was going on, as I felt it was a bit of a copout, and it was something I’d seen too often in other SF books (Xenocide by Orson Scott Card comes to mind, as does Heinlein’s Number of the Beast and the last book or two in Farmer’s Riverworld series). Plus, it got to be very confusing with who was doing what where and the multiple realities and timelines and everything. In fact, I’m pretty sure there was one plot point involving those multiple realities/times that didn’t make any sense at all. When you have such a high concept story like this, it probably doesn’t make much sense to say that some of it was too preposterous, but that’s still what I felt at times. A narrative still has to be consistent within itself, but I felt it violated its own rules at times. The story ended pretty definitely, but still left some unanswered questions and some foreshadowing for another possible sequel.

I don’t want to tell people to not read Ilium just because Olympos isn’t nearly as good, because I think everyone should read Ilium. But if you read Ilium, you pretty much have to read Olympos to see how it all plays out. Just prepare to be disappointed.

Latre.

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.

When we were discussing this several months ago, I thought the whole ebook thing was essentially dead or relegated to a niche market, though I was wondering what effect Amazon’s Kindle would have on that market. Well, I guess it must be a positive effect. Sounds like it’s hard to keep those puppies in stock. Are they really that popular or is Amazon just trying to make it seem that way with their supply issues? Note that I still don’t have a Kindle – I’m still using the ebook reader on my PDA. I was kind of hoping that once third party applications start flooding onto the iPhone, that ebooks and an ebook reader will be one of the first things. It’s really easy to read stuff on the iPhone’s screen, especially with all the resizing you can do and the smoothness of the fonts and images. However, the battery life would be a killer, especially if you were on a trip. They’d have to figure out someway to not suck the battery dry. Heck, even my Palm T|X starts to run out of juice at the end of long plane flights if I’m using it to read the whole time.

(BTW, there’s another disadvantage to reading books on my PDA that I failed to mention in my original post on the subject. The PDA screen is hard to read outside, especially in sunlight. The iPhone is much better with this.)

Anyway, I’m glad to see that the whole ebook thing is gaining interest, and I’ll keep using the ebook reader in my PDA and buying books for it. (Although I’ve been using it less and less since I got the iPhone. The ability to easily peruse the Internet anywhere when I’m bored often beats out the ability to read a book anywhere.) But real books aren’t going away anytime soon. Feel free to jump on the bandwagon, but do it because you have a use for the technology, not because it’s cool.

I can’t believe I just said that.

Latre.

I did read 2001 and one or two of its sequels, which I enjoyed more than the original book. I never did read Childhood’s End, which a lot of my friends recommended. So, aside from a few short stories, the only other work of his that I can remember reading was Rendezvous With Rama. I read it as part of a science fiction class in high school taught by a teacher serving time who was teaching as part of his work release program. He was a big science fiction fan, although I frequently disagreed with his tastes and analysis. I did a book report on Rama, and from what I remember, he gave me a bad grade on it, saying that I totally got the theme wrong. Which was probably true, but hey, I wasn’t a very good reader back then. And who cares about the theme anyway when you’re that age? You just want a good page-turning read. Which Rama was, despite the fact that, like with most Clarke books (I hear), there’s no real antagonist in the story. All conflict came from Man Facing The Unknown, and there wasn’t any clear-cut answers or explanations. That kind of thing is entertaining once in awhile, but I’m not into a steady diet of it. I want some juicy villains or conflicts of emotion. I did like the “reveal” at the very end of Rama, even though it sort of made the thing into a shaggy dog story. (I never read the sequels.)

So, anyway, here’s to you, Mr Clarke. I hope your own final journey into the unknown gave you some concrete answers, and you didn’t just end up in some big white room and turn into an embryo.

Latre.

Jogged Today: Yes (@ 38°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:

• “Spiderwebs” (No Doubt)
• “Don’t You Feel Small (Original Mix)” (Moody Blues)
• “The Joke” (The Connells)
• “The Queen Of Eyes” (Soft Boys)
• “Sunday Afternoon” (The 88)
• “Horrible Day” (Frank Black)
• “Family Affairs” (Fay Ray)

Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “christian ways to punish misbehaved kids”.

Good question, Librarian, and thanks for the topic. (Note: See my recent thoughts on eBooks here and here.) On first perusal, it looks pretty darn enticing. I haven’t experienced electronic ink in person; it looks like something that is pretty cool and which I’d like. It should negate any eyestrain complaints that people have about eBooks. And even though I didn’t think that the wireless connection was that strong of a selling point, I now believe it’s a good thing. I especially like the way Amazon has implemented it, where you don’t even need to be connected to WiFi. You can basically download any of the eBooks (not to mention some newspapers, magazines, and blogs) at any time, anywhere. And there’s no charge for the connection. That’s pretty huge, especially if you’re traveling. It looks like the selection of books is large and is growing all the time. Price for individual books (around $10) is a little high but workable. The lack of backlighting means that you can read it as well outside in sunshine as you can inside, and that’s big for me. And hey, Neil Gaiman endorses it, so you know it’s gotta be hip.

But here’s some things I don’t like:

• Amazon uses their own proprietary eBook format. So you’re locked into getting ebooks only from Amazon. You can apparently convert some non-DRMed eBook files in other formats to Kindler’s format, but I wouldn’t be able to transfer the eBooks I’ve bought from eReader for my Palm T|X PDA (which are in PDB format, and which have DRM). I don’t want to have to buy the same books again in a different format. And what happens if the format ever goes obsolete and you may not be able to read the eBooks you’ve already bought?
• The whole unit looks a little big to me, even though it’s fairly light (10 oz). It’s not something you could slip in your pocket like my PDA. But, again, it’s probably easier to read for a longer time because eyestrain won’t be as bad on something that size.
• They’ll probably make you turn it off around takeoff and landing times on a plane, because of the wireless connection. Even if you turn off the wireless connection, they may still make you power off the whole unit. And those are times when you really want to be able to read a book. (Although, to be fair, my PDA kinda has the same problem.)
• Because of the lack of backlighting, you can’t read it in a dark room (unless you have a traditional book light). I like being able to read my PDA in the dark, especially at those times when I’m not ready to go to sleep yet and my sweetie is.
• The price is a little steep ($400). I’m sure that even though the wireless connection is free, there’s probably some other hidden fees there somewhere. And each book has to be purchased separately, of course.

Damn, that’s a cool gadget, despite the issues. If the price were lower, I may consider picking up one of these babies soon. But for now I’ll stick with my PDA for eBook reading.

Jogged Today: No, it’s snowing and the sidewalks/streets are icy.
Today’s Weight: 163.4 lbs
Lunch Yesterday: Half of a huge breakfast burrito at the Lime XS on 6th Ave. I took the rest home. I was a good boy.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Too many cool gadgets, too little time and money.

Latre.

I think I failed to make it clear in my original post that just because I prefer eBooks at this point doesn’t mean that I think everybody should feel the same way or that they’ll eventually replace paper books. No, I realize I’m in a very small minority here. It’s right for my lifestyle, but not for everyone’s.

Reading these articles has pointed out a number of other advantages that paper books have over eBooks that I didn’t realize before. Among them:

• Paper books are a heckuva lot easier to lend to other people and to share. (Isn’t that illegal though? Shouldn’t everybody who reads a book have to pay for it? Where’s the publishing world’s version of the RIAA when you need it?) And then there’s all those sticky DRM (Digital Rights Management) issues…
• The reader technology may eventually become obsolete, rendering your library/collection somewhat unusable. I forgot that there are a number of competing formats for publishing and reading eBooks, and that some of them may fall by the wayside. How do you know your hitching your library to the correct horse (now there’s a picture)? I see this as a pretty big problem. Looks like they’re working towards a standard format, but that might take awhile, and it could render my current collection obsolete.
• Reading electronic print may cause eyestrain/headaches for a number of people. Many people may not be able to read for very long before they have to stop. (Luckily this doesn’t seem to apply to me.) Staring at a screen will do strange things to people. However, I think that technology will eventually solve this problem as the eBooks start to resemble real books more and more (see eInk).
• Must have a computer in order to download books and get them into the reader. (This is changing.)

So, thank you Janet for opening my eyes. Though I’m not happy with the way the wind is blowing, I’m still going to be using my trusty eReader.

Pet Peeve Of The Day: My fellow early morning darkness joggers who wear dark clothing so the vehicles can’t easily spot them. They give the rest of us a bad name. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve almost gotten into a jogger-vs-jogger sidewalk collision with one of these people. Really, I can’t tell you.

BTW, my buddy/co-worker and frequent blog commenter DMR has started his own blog, chronicling his move from the wonderful world of Colorado to the pits of depravity on the east coast: New Yankee. Check it out. I’ve added you to the blogroll, dude.

Latre.

So, lately I’ve been reading Olympos in both forms; usually I’ll read the hardback when I’m at home, and the eBook when I’m not. This gives me a good chance to compare what’s it like reading a big novel like this in paper form vs electronic form. I’ve talked a bit before about reading eBooks on my Palm T|X PDA with eReader (I’ve also got MobiPocket reader, though I mostly stick with eReader). Keep in mind that this comparison applies only to using eReader on a T|X. There are other eBook readers out there, and some are bigger (like this one), with larger screen real estate to display more of a page. But they’re also bulkier and not as easy to carry around with you at all times. Anyway, here we go.

Advantages of an eBook:

• Can take it anywhere. If you nearly always carry your PDA with you, then you always have something to read. This is invaluable when waiting for someone or something. It’s nice to be able to sneak in a few pages while I’m in the car waiting for N to get off work, for example. Real books are much harder to tote around, especially if you’re dealing with a hardback like I’m currently doing with Olympos. You can even do a little reading if you’re standing in line somewhere.
• Can carry multiple books with you. You’re limited only by the memory in the PDA/reader. My Palm T|X can store many very large books, especially with an expansion memory card installed. This is cool if you’re in the middle of nowhere and are getting tired of the book you’re reading and want to switch to a different one.
• Since the PDA is backlit, you can essentially read in the dark. It works well if you want to read in bed while not disturbing a significant other who is trying to sleep. It also works well in other situations where there’s not a lot of light. True, small book lights with a paper book would work just as well, but they can be awkward.
• You can highlight a word in the eBook and it will automatically go look up the definition in the dictionary eBook. Of course, the default dictionary doesn’t have a lot in it, so at this point in my life, if I don’t know the word, it’s likely the dictionary doesn’t have it either. But you can buy more complete dictionaries.
• You can search for any word. This is handy when you want to re-read some important exposition passage or whatever, but don’t remember what chapter it was in. If you can remember a key word, you can find it.
• It always remembers where you are in the eBook. If you’re reading multiple eBooks, it remembers where you were in all of them. Much better than a physical bookmark, especially since you can essentially get it down to the paragraph.
• eBooks take up a lot less space than real books. In my current mode of trying to simplify my life, I’d really like to get rid of all the paperbacks and hardbacks I’ve accumulated over the years. Yet I’d like to have some of my favorites available in case I want to read them again or refer to them. eBooks solve that problem (assuming the book is available as an eBook).
• eBooks are backed up on the computer, and can also be read there.
• The price is usually the same or cheaper than the non-electronic version. When the cheaper paperback version of the book comes out, the eBook becomes cheaper also.
• Have the book always available to show to other people, in case you want to read an excerpt to them or something. I remember one dinner out where my friend Lisa read all of Letter To A Christian Nation from my PDA during the course of the evening.
• Lots of different options on eReader to customize your reading experience. I like using “autoscroll”, which makes it so you don’t even have to click anywhere or punch any buttons to see the next page – it just keeps scrolling the text forward line-by-line at whatever speed you choose. You can set bookmarks anywhere, and can make your own notes/annotations. I also like being able to adjust the font size and the font and background colors for maximum readability. I have mine set to white text on a blue background:

Advantages of a real, solid book:

• There’s something that just can’t be beat about the feel of a book in your hands. With eBooks, it somehow doesn’t feel like you’re really reading. Though I’m slowly overcoming that feeling. Holding the eBook reader can become a bit uncomfortable after awhile, mainly due to its small size.
• If you’re a collector like me, you like having the finished book sitting there on the bookshelf – it makes you feel like you’ve achieved something. And it just looks cool.
• In a similar vein, browsing a website isn’t as fun as browsing a book store. And book stores at airports are going to need some kind of kiosk where you can download eBooks right away for those pre-trip impulse buys.
• This is a more personal thing. I like being able to see how many more pages I’ve got to go in the chapter. This is especially helpful when I’m reading in bed and am starting to feel tired. If there’s a lot of pages to go in the chapter, I’ll put it down. If not, I’ll read till the end of the chapter. This is harder to figure out using eBooks, especially since the “page size” is so much smaller and you’re not looking at much text at any one time.
• You never have to worry about running out of power. The eBook reader can run out of battery juice at inopportune times. When I was flying back from my east coast trip in June, and got stuck on the tarmac for hours because of the air traffic control computer problems, I actually came very close to running out of power on my PDA. I was getting the “low battery” indicator as we were descending into Denver. I have to learn to conserve power better on the PDA – turning off Bluetooth and WiFi when not needed, for example. But really, this is only a problem if you’re away from a power outlet for a long time.
• Pictures/illustrations usually look better in a real book. Sometimes the eBook won’t have them at all, or won’t be able to display them in a pleasing manner.
• Not every book is available as an eBook, although there are more all the time. I’m especially disappointed that David Brin’s Uplift series is not available in eBook format (yet), since Startide Rising is perhaps my all-time favorite book. So I guess I’ll have to keep some of those paperbacks a bit longer.

Winner: eBooks.

Though I’m sure I’ll always have some real books around, I can see which way the wind is blowing for me…

[Update/Edit] For more on the eBook “controversy”, see this followup post, where I even modify my feelings a bit.

Pet Peeve Of The Day: [Updated/Edited] When I forget to actually fill in the Pet Peeve Of The Day.

Latre.