EREC: erotic romance
Sunday, September 21, 2008
First thoughts on the Cybook Gen3 -- Jules
This is mirrored from my own blog -- there's 2000 words of it and I don't know how to do a cut tag in blogger, so you'll find the whole thing on either my WordPress blog or my LiveJournal.
I bought a second-hand Cybook Gen3 ebook reader from my writing partner last month, and I've been using it long enough now to have some initial thoughts about it. This isn't a proper review, as I haven’t been exploring all its features. What I *have* been doing with it is simply reading some of the books she’d loaded on it, mostly on the bus to and from work.
And the obvious question is - do I regret spending one hundred pounds on this thing? After all, I could buy quite a few paperbacks for that money. To which the answer is "no", and for a specific reason I'll get to at the end of this post. And it's not one of the obvious reasons, like saving shelf space or being able to carry a hundred books with me at all times, although I can see the advantages there.
Would I buy one at full market price? (Currently 269 pounds if shipped to the UK.) Probably not, but mostly because the wee beastie is physically fragile, and I fully expect that I'll manage to break it within a year or two given my current usage of it. I can see why other people would pay that for it, and why I might in other circumstances.
( read more about the pros and cons in the full post at my book blog )
And the killer app for me? I can read it on the bus without feeling car-sick.
If I try to read a dead tree book on the bus, I start feeling sick after a few minutes. I can read if I'm careful, but it requires a certain amount of thought and stopping as soon as I feel in the least bit queasy. I took the Cybook with me on the bus the first week I had it, mostly because otherwise I’d have to wait until the following weekend to have time to play with it - and was still reading at journey's end. By the end of the week, it was clear that this was not a one-off. In the month since, I've found that if the bus is *really* bumpy I need to put the Cybook down for a minute or two, but I can usually read it without problems. I don't know why there’s a difference (my guess is that it’s at least partly to do with the Cybook being completely rigid), but since I spend around an hour a day on the bus at the moment, something that lets me read during that hour is *well* worth the hundred pounds I paid for it. While I'm doing that commute, you will have to prise my Cybook from my cold dead hands...
I bought a second-hand Cybook Gen3 ebook reader from my writing partner last month, and I've been using it long enough now to have some initial thoughts about it. This isn't a proper review, as I haven’t been exploring all its features. What I *have* been doing with it is simply reading some of the books she’d loaded on it, mostly on the bus to and from work.
And the obvious question is - do I regret spending one hundred pounds on this thing? After all, I could buy quite a few paperbacks for that money. To which the answer is "no", and for a specific reason I'll get to at the end of this post. And it's not one of the obvious reasons, like saving shelf space or being able to carry a hundred books with me at all times, although I can see the advantages there.
Would I buy one at full market price? (Currently 269 pounds if shipped to the UK.) Probably not, but mostly because the wee beastie is physically fragile, and I fully expect that I'll manage to break it within a year or two given my current usage of it. I can see why other people would pay that for it, and why I might in other circumstances.
( read more about the pros and cons in the full post at my book blog )
And the killer app for me? I can read it on the bus without feeling car-sick.
If I try to read a dead tree book on the bus, I start feeling sick after a few minutes. I can read if I'm careful, but it requires a certain amount of thought and stopping as soon as I feel in the least bit queasy. I took the Cybook with me on the bus the first week I had it, mostly because otherwise I’d have to wait until the following weekend to have time to play with it - and was still reading at journey's end. By the end of the week, it was clear that this was not a one-off. In the month since, I've found that if the bus is *really* bumpy I need to put the Cybook down for a minute or two, but I can usually read it without problems. I don't know why there’s a difference (my guess is that it’s at least partly to do with the Cybook being completely rigid), but since I spend around an hour a day on the bus at the moment, something that lets me read during that hour is *well* worth the hundred pounds I paid for it. While I'm doing that commute, you will have to prise my Cybook from my cold dead hands...
Labels: Cybook, ebook readers, eink, epaper, Jules Jones
¶ posted at 8:30 AM by Jules Jones 6 Comments
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Happenings--veinglory
It appears that the Erotic Romance Writers Forum along with many other forumer.com forums has been hacked. Please do not visit the forum until this has been resolved as the url seems to lead to malware. --fixed.
Shadowfire Press's grand opening is tomorrow (the 1st of August):
Ezine HelixSF is apparently miffed with some authors for withdrawing their work. In response some of the authors started their own ezine.
"The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling, available for pre-order now. This book of fairy tales was written to supplement the Harry Potter series and will be published in two new editions on December 4, 2008 ... Amazon is also thrilled to offer a luxuriously packaged Collector's Edition". And for a mere $100. Can no author finish a best-selling series as planned and just walk away with their dignity more-or-less intact? Probably not, so long as the luxury edition is Amazon ranked at #7 before it even goes on sale. Oh, and Amazon is emailing every associate an affiliate link ensuring many positively-toned blog posts. (No, the link above is not an affiliate link).
Esquire magazine's e-ink cover shows the limitations of the format more than the advantages IMHO. It is, amongst other things, a huge and pointless waste of resources to produce a disposable e-ink magazine cover that can only display 2 images. Especially when its display qualities (contrast, brightness, durability) will compare unfavorably with glossy paper. What does it prove to use technology in a way that shows its inferiority for that purpose--it is just gee whiz innovation for its own sake, not the sake of improved functionality. [/rant]
Shadowfire Press's grand opening is tomorrow (the 1st of August):
Ezine HelixSF is apparently miffed with some authors for withdrawing their work. In response some of the authors started their own ezine.
"The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling, available for pre-order now. This book of fairy tales was written to supplement the Harry Potter series and will be published in two new editions on December 4, 2008 ... Amazon is also thrilled to offer a luxuriously packaged Collector's Edition". And for a mere $100. Can no author finish a best-selling series as planned and just walk away with their dignity more-or-less intact? Probably not, so long as the luxury edition is Amazon ranked at #7 before it even goes on sale. Oh, and Amazon is emailing every associate an affiliate link ensuring many positively-toned blog posts. (No, the link above is not an affiliate link).
Esquire magazine's e-ink cover shows the limitations of the format more than the advantages IMHO. It is, amongst other things, a huge and pointless waste of resources to produce a disposable e-ink magazine cover that can only display 2 images. Especially when its display qualities (contrast, brightness, durability) will compare unfavorably with glossy paper. What does it prove to use technology in a way that shows its inferiority for that purpose--it is just gee whiz innovation for its own sake, not the sake of improved functionality. [/rant]
Labels: eink, JK, SHADOWFIRE
¶ posted at 8:04 AM by Emily Veinglory 3 Comments
