{"id":667,"date":"2011-06-27T08:59:11","date_gmt":"2011-06-27T12:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/?p=667"},"modified":"2012-05-28T20:37:24","modified_gmt":"2012-05-29T00:37:24","slug":"hard-to-hear-a-new-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/2011\/06\/27\/hard-to-hear-a-new-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard to Hear a New Voice"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"ebooks,<\/a>

ebooks, eReading<\/p><\/div>\n

Hard to Hear a New Voice<\/strong><\/p>\n

February 18, 2009<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve mentioned,\u00a0I\u2019ve 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.\u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read everything on one device or another, including the following books, or large sections of them: Shakespeare\u2019s King Lear, Macbeth, Chaucer, Cicero, Milton, numerous writings of Martin Luther, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Thomas Carlyle\u2019s\u00a0Sartor Resartus<\/em>, and over the years\u00a0more than I can immediately remember. Most recently, I\u2019ve read D. H. Lawrence,\u00a0Studies in Classic American Literature<\/em>, a book I always wanted to get around to reading, though he was never one of my literary heroes: \u201cIt is hard to hear a new voice\u2026 We just don\u2019t listen.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think something like that has happened with eReaders, as it has with literature and poetry, but it\u2019s changing as the technology has improved. The Kindle didn\u2019t appeal to me given the required uploading of one\u2019s own documents, and downloading them back to the device. I chose the Sony Reader because I believe it\u2019s more flexible. I have an existing library of over a thousand books from Gutenberg.org and all over the Net, including some I\u2019ve scanned myself. I wanted more control over my library than I ultimately felt the Kindle and other eReaders would allow me.<\/p>\n

Sony\u2019s software, though, has problems that get in the way of the experience of reading, requiring far too much tinkering around to copy files already sorted on one\u2019s hard drive into \u201ccollections.\u201d They\u2019ve been criticized too, perhaps justly, for trying to corner the market in their own way. I think Sony has a chance of beating the Kindle and other devices, if it allows readers to\u00a0hear the voices, <\/em>some\u00a0new<\/em>,\u00a0of the writers they want, not just those on its propriatary bookstore site, and develops a better software package to support the eReading experience. Only one or two updates during the last few years just isn\u2019t enough support for serious improvement to take place. Sony needs to listen to and\u00a0to hear <\/em>its users if it\u2019s ever really going to improve, and not just the technically inclined, but those who are\u00a0serious<\/em> readers of real literature, not the predominantly popular schlock they\u2019re pushing on their elibrary bookstore.<\/p>\n

Or Sony\u2019s Reader will go, I suppose, the way of the US car industry… another company will figure it out.<\/p>\n

Frederick Glaysher<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve read everything on one device or another, including the following books, or large sections of them: Shakespeare\u2019s King Lear, Macbeth, Chaucer, Cicero, Milton, numerous writings of Martin Luther, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Thomas Carlyle\u2019s Sartor Resartus, and over the years more than I can immediately remember. Most recently, I\u2019ve read D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, a book I always wanted to get around to reading, though he was never one of my literary heroes: \u201cIt is hard to hear a new voice\u2026 We just don\u2019t listen.\u201d Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[199],"tags":[385,386,383,259,805,388,93,387,389,384,320],"class_list":["post-667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ereading","tag-chaucer","tag-cicero","tag-d-h-lawrence","tag-ebooks-2","tag-ereading","tag-joel-barlow","tag-john-milton","tag-martin-luther","tag-philip-freneau","tag-shakespeare","tag-sony-reader"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}