February 23rd, 2010
The Future is Electronic – or is it?
I’m a fan of technology… always have been. From my Dad’s first home-made ‘beeb’ computer I used to play what I consider to be some of the best computer games of all time on, to my first film-loading camera, to my first Walkman, to my first (and only) Playstation, to my first mobile phone, to my first iPod, to my first handheld games console, to my first laptop, to my first digital camera, to my first Mac, to my first iPhone, to my first ebook reader. Oh wait. It’s not actually my ebook reader. No no, it’s the library’s ebook reader. But still, there’s an ebook reader in my hand and for this week I’m calling it mine (it’s a pocket edition Sony eBook Reader)!
So why do I have one? Well, we’re looking into how we can make use of them in the library – whether ebook readers are an appropriate means to deliver content to our students, whether this is feasible or not and whether our users would even be interested in having access to electronic readers – and we have both the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eBook Reader to evaluate. I must admit, one comes in pretty handy when you’ve a load of PDFs to read – simple drag and drop them on and away you go (the Kindle even allows you to annotate, highlight and save clippings). It’s small and light enough to carry anywhere and everywhere and the long-life battery means you only need to charge every couple of thousand page turns. Now being used to charging my phone most days this actually blows my mind!
However, I’m not entirely sold. I found that rather than being as technologically advanced as expected the devices were actually rather painful from a usability perspective. They feel clunky, content is difficult to browse, page turns are slow and it does bother me that they don’t have backlights. Oh and did I mention that because we’re UK customers a lot of the Kindle functionality is not available – wireless access to Wikipedia/blogs etc – and we are unable to buy content for the Sony eBook Reader from the Sony eBook store. How bizarre.
What I will say is that when it came to reading I did rather enjoy using it. I don’t know much about this e-ink display thing but it’s not like reading from a mini computer screen (which to be honest is what I expected) and it was handy being able to just hold the reader and turn pages in one hand and eat my soup with the other.
As for the content, if you want to read classics fine but if not I’m afraid you’re rather limited. eBooks are expensive still and generally not particularly of interest to me (well of interest enough to warrant the initial expenditure) and in a library setting they’re not particular scholarly (unless we’re talking the study of classics). I’m definitely more sold on the idea of storing and reading PDFs or Word files on the device and being able to annotate documents is certainly useful. Princeton University for example went as far as handing out devices to students preloaded with content – but I don’t think this really went down so well either.
Generally I think I’m swaying more to the side of buying ebooks that are compatible with ebook readers to loan to students rather than loaning out the devices. But is this managable? Would we have the ability to remove content from a user’s device once the loan period had expired? Something worth looking into eh? I think what I’m really waiting for is the iPad! Now this looks like a handy piece of kit.
If you’re interested in finding out more about ebook readers there are seriously hundreds of review sites but some of the ones I looked at include: eBook Readers Review; eBook Readers and Wired.
