Practicing what I preach
August 27th, 2007 | 
Author: 
Last Spring my daughter took a Shakespeare course. She wanted to buy the books, I said no, they are public domain, use your REB 1100. She gave in, only because she didn’t have the money to pay for the material she needed. I got the feeling she felt singled out as everyone, to include her professor, was intrigued by her device. It was the first time any of them had heard of or seen an e-book. She complained that it was hard to follow along during class with her reader. I told her that was operator ignorance. It should have been easier to search, make notes, and highlight important passages. She sighed and rolled her eyes. So now she only uses her N770 for leisure purposes (She gave me back the REB1100). Did she have some valid complaints? Is it harder to use an e-book device in an academic setting? I am about to find out. Starting tomorrow morning I will be back at school. I enrolled in a sophomore English literature course. My sources for books will be Project Gutenberg and the Harvard Classics, I downloaded from Mobileread. My plan is to be totally paperless with the exception of exams. Hopefully I will be able to find all the needed text on the Internet or within my own collection of e-books. Also I will use a different e-book device each week. I’ll keep everyone posted regularly and end with lessons learned.
P.S. I haven’t forgotten about my iLiad. Things are going a lot better and before the end of the week I’ll post my first impressions.
Posted in Devices
While I love ebooks, and am currently converting my p-library to an e-library, there are issues with them. For example, in the case of your daughter, I can see how navigation can be an issue. “Everybody turn to page 124 please, and comment on his first paragraph.” Turning to “page” 124 in the REB 1100 probably takes her to a completely different location.
Flipping between 2 pages (current page, and the appendix for example) can be annoying and time consuming. While I love my iLiad, it can take “forever” to power up and get to a page.
Now if you understand the limitations, and are willing to adapt to them, then ebooks are the best. Every book that I buy gets sliced and scanned. I can carry hundreds around with me on an 8gb CF in my iLiad.
BJ,
You point out a huge part of her complaint. I tried to look at it the same way a person would feel if they had an older edition of a text book. Some of the kids had different copies of the plays since they weren’t in the bookstore. Then again, I sorta felt her pain when I compared it to being in church and the pastor says turn to Matthew Chapter 5 Verse 20 or something like that. It takes me a while to get there, so I got a e-bible and now I can keep up.
Wow, you must be dedicated to slice and scan. I have thought about it, but I don’t know where to even begin. I read that the Fujitsu multi-page scanner was good. Would love to hear how you do it. I see books all the time that I want, but it’s not in e-book format. Mostly I would scan those bargain books, my old books, etc. Could be a great hobby.
Ellen
Ellen:
I currently live in Korea (I work for the US Military), and expecting to move (probably within the next 2 years or so). While I came here 12 years ago with only 2 suitcases, my love of reading rebult my library, and Amazon is the dealer I go to when I need a fix.
Anyway, shortly after clearing out all my old books out of my fathers garage in NJ, and having 42 boxes of books shipped over here, I realized I never wanted to have to ship them again. While I could donate them, it would break my heart, and I would probably end up buying them on Amazon again anyway (if I could find them!).
Anyway, I decided about a year ago that I would start cutting up my books and scanning them. It broke my heart as I really love my books, yet it was a sort of “kill them to save them” decision. At first I used a razorblade to slice the books, but that was a lot of work, and then I gave myself a nasty cut. So we bought (for about 150 dollars), an industrial grade paper cutter that can slide 400 sheets by just pulling a lever. I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap 500 (about 400 dollars), which can scan doublesided. I set it for “Best” scanning quality, which allows me to scan about 15 sheets per minutes (30 pages), so a 300 page book takes about 10 minutes to scan. The software then OCRs the text, and saves it in a PDF format.
Depending on the font size, etc, the OCR can take a while, but for the most part I can process 1 book per hour. It can get little tedious at times, but I consider it a labor of love.
I can then read my books on the iLiad’s wonderfully large screen, and have found it my preffered reading method. The iLiad has some flaws (too long to boot, etc), but for reading, it is amazing.
bj
Another reason it was hard to use the ebook in class is because poetry and plays use line numbers. The e-book didn’t.
Laura,
That could be because of the version used to make the e-book. It may have been left out. So that is something potential users should think about before using a particular version.
Ellen
BJ,
Thanks. I feel your pain. When I was in the military, I had to sacriface many of my books as I moved from place to place. Books can really put you over your weight allowance. I think this is something that I could get into and from what you say, it doesn’t take that long or a very large investment. Thanks again for sharing.
Ellen