Category Archives: Reader

The Immediacy of Technology

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One of the greatest advantages of all the technology we have around us is our immediate access to our cultural reference material. On several occasions now I have seen authors speaking about their books on television, logged onto the Sony eBook Store and purchased and downloaded their book into my Sony Reader before their interview was over.

The other night, I was watching Terminator: The Sarah Conners Chronicles and heard a wonderfully Scottish song “Donald, Where’s Your Trousers”. I logged on to Amazon to find five or six versions of the song, listened to the samples of them, and purchased (for only 99 cents) the song as sung by The Kerry Boys. I’ve been listening to it all morning as I blog. You can listen to a sample here if you are interested.

Incidentally, today marks the 8th month anniversary of this blog. Yea!

My eBook Library Reaches 1500

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My ever-expanding eBook library has reached 1500 volumes and continues to grow. Fictionwise, my secondary source to purchase eBooks has had a 50% rebate special, so I’ve bought several new books about publishing. In addition I’ve added quite a few public domain offerings from Manybooks, Feedbooks, Munsey’s, and MobileRead Forums.

Some of my most recent titles are: An Egyptian Princess by Georg Ebers, The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy, and Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The Ease of eBooks

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A great deal has been written about how easy it is to purchase and download a book on the Amazon Kindle. The Sony PRS Reader is only slightly less convenient in this regard. On more than one occassion I have seen a book being discussed on TV, went to my computer and purchased it, and then connected the Reader and transfered the book to it before the discussion was over. This week I got an add for a book by email, looked for the book online to see if it was available in eBook form (it was), and then purchased and downloaded it. This may not be the most compelling reason to buy an eBook Reader, but it is so nice, not to have to wait to go to the bookstore or the library to get the book you want.

What I’m Reading Now

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Between grad school, teaching, and trying to write I’m finding very little time to read. I’m still working my way through Royal Harlot by Susan Holloway Scott. It’s not my usual type of read, but I’m enjoying it well enough. Of course I’m reading it on my Sony Reader, having downloaded it from the Sony eBook Store.

Finding Free eBooks

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As I’ve mentioned before, Finding Free eBooks is a great resource for locating… guess. Free eBooks! If you look to the right, just below the City of Amathar books, you will find a little button linking to this site. If you are smart, you’ll check it at least once a day, because it is updated OFTEN.

And don’t forget to download the free PDF books right here on this page. More will be forthcoming– hopefully on a monthly basis.

Historical Fiction Challenge & More

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I may be the last to know about it, but I’m getting in on it now. Over at Royal Reviews they have a series of reading challenges, the newest of which is the Historical Fiction Challenge. Details can be found here. Although it means I’ll have to set aside “Team of Rivals” for a bit, that’s o.k. I’m in.


O.K. I’m going to do the “Book vs. Movie Challenge too. Details are here. The real bummer is that I finished Twilight on Christmas morning.

Christmas Gifts

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I got quite a few great gifts for Christmas this year, including a new case with built in booklight for my SonyReader. I was skeptical about adding another pane of glass over the eink screen, but it really is a better option for reading in lower light than any of the clip-on book lights. It is a bit pricy, but hey, it was a present.

Sony PRS-505 as an Ipod

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As regular readers will remember, my beloved mp3 player died a few weeks ago. One of the reasons for my purchase of the Sony Reader was its ability to play mp3s. The internal memory of the PRS-505 is a tiny 256 megs, but there are two memory card slots– one for a Sony Memory Stick and one for an SD card.

Books take up very little memory. I now have 320 books on my reader and have filled up only a teeny pie slice of one data card. Mp3s on the other hand use a bit o’ memory, so I bought a 2 gig Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo, and a 4 gig SDHC card. So far I have only a dozen or so songs loaded but I have room for almost as many as I had on my GoGear. Note: The Sony Reader will play mp3s, but not wma files.

I read on my Sony Reader all the time, but I’ve only plugged in earbuds once or twice. The sound is top notch, but I’m so into my reading that I forget all about the music.

Addition: I plugged my Reader into my speaker system to listen to music last night and it stopped twice– once at the end of a song and once in the middle. I’ve got to check it out and see if there is something wrong with those two particular mp3s.

Sony PRS-505 and Feedbooks

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I’ve mentioned Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com/ before. It is a great source for free ebooks. As I click over today, I see the four featured books are Moonfleet by J. Meade Faulkner, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, and On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin. Pretty cool, huh? You can of course find tens of thousands of other books on the site as well. But if you click on one of these titles, you will be given the choice of downloading them in one of six different formats– epub, Mobipocket/Kindle, PDF, SonyReader, iLiad, Custom PDF. Now the Sony Reader will read the epub, and both types of pdfs, but if you have one, you would naturally click on the SonyReader choice. This in fact does not give you a native Sony file. It gives you a pdf formatted for the Sony Reader. This is fine, and it works great, but by using Calibre (see yesterday’s post) you can convert the file into a native Sony lrf.

Sony PRS-505 and Calibre

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I love my new Sony PRS-505 book reader. I’m not going to get involved in the format wars. I considered a Kindle before I bought my Sony after all, and I gave that up back in 1985 when I bought my Amiga. What I will tell you is that you won’t be disappointed in a digital book reader if you are a book lover. They are great. I’ve been reading much more than I have in a long time.

If you buy a Sony Reader, you must download the Calibre program. You can get it here. This program allows you to convert just about any ebook format into the native Sony format. In fact, the ebooks converted this way can be created with all the possible features enabled, such as hotlinked tables of contents. Though the reader displays pdf files just fine, I find that I can make them easier to read by converting them with Calibre. I can change the font size and set up a table of contents in about twenty seconds.