eReading

Papyrus, cuneiform clay tablets, rice paper, palm leaves, tree bark, vellum, deer skin, decorative gilt leather, chiseled marble, copper plates, silk scrolls for fastidious delectation, and so on…. ebooks will find their role and level, which I too think is inevitable. One thing all these FORMS of reading demonstrate is that the nature and experience [...]

  Last April I read Lucian of Samosata’s A True History or Trip to the Moon, circa 160 AD from a text on Gutenberg and a second one I found on Google. As a Journey, it was interesting to me, especially given its destination. I found it, though, a little tedious, too poorly structured and [...]

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve now read books on a digital device for over a decade. I started with the original Palm PDA, the green one, a piece of ancient technology. I then progressed up the scale with two subsequent Palms and now have the Sony Reader PRS-5o5, which seems to me an incredible leap forward. I’ve read [...]

Reading and eReading are the same. But then…. I suppose what I was thinking of was that eReading can be as absorbing and imaginative as conventional reading, yet there are advantages to eReading. Often, we think in reverse. What is lost or diminished by a mechanical device. I don’t want one or the other, but [...]

Reading is reading is eReading. And then I have afterthoughts. It is different. I “access” it in a different way. It feels different. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t want to read every book in digital format. Cover and paper weight have an aesthetic feel to them that steel and aluminum can’t provide. The leather case for [...]

Author of Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote Journey to Parnassus in 1614, about four years before he died. I’ve wanted to read this book for the last year or more. I had search antiquarian bookstores online but discovered the only translation of it was in 1883, and they wanted, if memory serves, about $200 for it. [...]

Probably about 80% of the over 1200 ebooks I have are from Gutenberg.org, from where I’ve been collecting books since at least about the early 1990s, mostly in ascii text format. The Sony Reader handles Gutenberg files very well. Since I read a lot of poetry, I don’t even have to format them in any [...]

I use a Sony Reader PRS-505. In March of 2007, I saw one at Barnes & Noble on display and sat down and played with it for half an hour, and that was it! I had to get one. (I don’t have any affiliation with Sony or B&N.) It’s a very comfortable device to read [...]