cowfish

So, with the talk of shiny new MacBooks appearing today, I have been thinking a lot about shiny techy things of late. With the destruction of my little old MacBook via the medium of a glass of red wine I have been considering getting one of those new ones, especially when I heard the rumour that they were hand carved out of blocks of solid alumin(i)um by angels and gently polished using the souls of recently deceased Mac zealots (they do seem to come from a single block of alumin(i)um, which makes me wonder about the sprayed out metal chips and what they are used for. They claim it’s green…). However, I heard tales of prices just a bit richer than I was willing to pay, so I turned to my fall back technological option – The Sony Reader.

Not quite Hen’s Tooth-like in scarceness, but still rather hard to find due to Sony selling out a bit faster than they thought, the Reader is a shiny piece of electronic paper goodness that I have been lusting after for a while. After the Eden Lake screening that I went to a while back, Mr Reynolds pulled his out of his magic sack and the assembled geeky end of the table ooh’d and aah’d over it for a while. They’ve finally been released over here and after a couple of weeks of asking nicely in branches of Waterstones I found one today (with only a mild peek at their website – the Ludgate Hill info is now out of date, as I got the last one).

I’ve only been playing with it for a little bit and so far it’s rather nice. The viewing angle on it makes the screen look very paperlike, with quite good contrast. It has an annoying flash as it changes pages, but does that quite quickly. My main annoyance has been the tieing with Waterstones, who have an awful website where the only way of searching for ebooks seems to be relying on the fact that all the ebooks so far have “ebook” in their title to distinguish them from the other versions. The rather crappy selection does not help matters. As Reynolds mentioned on his blog a while back he couldn’t find an ebook of Anathem, Mr Stephenson’s latest, on the site despite it being available in the USA. I had a tinker, found I couldn’t easily make the Sony store believe I was in America and promptly bought the Adobe Digital Editions version of the book from Diesel eBooks, although it did cost me twice as much. It so far seems to format fine on the screen (even when I press the “make bigger and reformat” button) but we shall see how it goes. By the time that The Temporal Void comes out (next Thursday, I hear) I will hopefully be pleased that it all works.

Now, those two books are the specific items that pushed me towards buying the shininess now. They are both, as were Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and all of Hamilton’s other books (almost), big arse hardbacks. I read the first two books in the Baroque Cycle as ebooks, as having bought the hardbacks I found them pretty much impossible to read while standing on the tube. I may now get a seat every day (thankyou Ealing Broadway), but they are still too big to fit in my bag. As such, a nice way of reading ebooks was something I was after – my previous experience of playing with my Palm PDAs definitely made me want something bigger and more booky. Now it seems I should be able to pick up both books (I am especially looking forward to Mr Hamilton’s as I know that Anathem may cause my brain to melt with it’s pretentiousness, which is not a problem), and read them without having to find a new bag or run the risk of have my hands tear off at the wrist if I am forced to stand on a train. Very messy.

I suspect this is not the last time you will hear of my Sony Reader…

Other posts

• Never judge a reader by the cover of their book
• Amplified08 (or Amplified 08 depending on what google says…)
• The Future of Books, prelude