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Make A Difference Day

Issue Date: July 15, 2001

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Popular e-Book devices and formats

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E-books: Hot or not?

Summer reading loaded, off I strolled into sand, surf and the strange new world of electronic literature.

I'm a married man. But I have another relationship -- one outside my marriage that predates it. I couldn't hide it, even if I wanted to. The evidence is all over my house, even in our bedroom. Thank goodness, my wife understands.

I have a love affair with books. In fact, my wife's a bookworm, too.

All my life, I've hoarded books. I have a cellar full of them, and a bedroom crammed with shelves overflowing with even more. I find books, especially old ones, somewhat mystical. The musty smell, brittle binding and cracked leather speak volumes, even before a word is read. An unopened book is a tiny treasure chest, with unimagined riches to be discovered within.

So when my editor asked me to write something about the new electronic books for computers, I winced. My bookworm id faced off against my tech-expert ego. The thrill of trying a cool new gadget collided with my raw passion for a good book. How could I possibly reconcile the two?

I decided there was only one way to do it. Much like teaching a cat to swim by tossing it into a lake, I opted for total immersion: Could a geek like me endure the ultimate survivor test by spending a week on a remote Caribbean island with nothing but e-books to read?

Of course, you can read e-books on a desktop computer, but I wasn't going to lug my PC on vacation. Instead, I took a device specially designed to display electronic books. E-book readers, which cost from $130 to $700, are mostly screen, with just a few buttons to turn "pages." Each holds about four or five books, enough for a week in the sun.

Before you can read a book, you have to buy one. I've bought books at Amazon.com, but there's nothing like browsing a bookstore. I've often stumbled on a great read just by perusing the stacks. Buying a paper book is easy and fun.

Buying an e-book is not. You can get them only at online stores, which don't lend themselves to browsing. And there are three incompatible electronic book formats. Imagine a store that sells French and German books -- yet all the covers are in English. I wasted 40 bucks buying books I couldn't read. Even worse, some books that should be compatible with an e-book reader can be read only on a PC. It's like buying a book you can read only at work.

Now, I'm not what you would call a sophisticated vacation reader. No trolls, dragons or elves? I'm not interested. And that's another pain: Not enough good e-books are available. I finally settled on just two hot new novels, Raymond Feist's "Krondor: Tear of the Gods" and Anne McCaffrey's "The Skies of Pern". Not my first choices, but good enough for vacation.

So with e-book in hand, I hit the beach. Big mistake. E-books and the outdoors don't mix. They're impossible to read: Bright sun reflects off the glass screen, making it a mirror. And they're fragile. I managed to shield mine from the sand and surf, but a computer does not belong on the beach. Plus, an e-book makes you wary. A stolen paperback is an inconvenience; a stolen e-book is a disaster.

Remove the beach, though, and an e-book is surprisingly good company. On the plane, and at night, I happily curled up with my e-books. They're better than paper books in many ways: Flipping a page is quick, the lighted screen makes reading in the dark fun, and the bundled dictionary deciphers new words easily.

So was my e-book vacation a success? Not exactly. But it wasn't ruined, either. Along with a beautiful ocean view, the house I rented included a bookshelf of discarded paperbacks -- lots of space opera, swords and sorcery. And I learned that, despite the compromises, e-books actually are fun to read.

The problem is, until I can leave a few lovingly dog-eared e-books on the shelf of a vacation cottage for the next visitor, they're doomed.

Contributing Editor Jim Louderback is editor of TechTV.

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