I've always loved to read, I could read a couple of books a day plus a few comics books that were always stored in the bathroom. After bedtime I'd read under the covers with a flashlight. After I grew up and left home, and then later became homeless, I took to always carrying a library book around with me in my purse. If things got long and drawn out where we were visiting, I'd take a trip to the powder room with my purse and my latest read.
The first ebook reader I ever tried out was in 1996 on my Psion 3. I don't remember the name of the program just now, but I liked the idea of having lots of huge books with me right there in my 2 MG electronic organizer. I also enjoyed the Psion 3a which came out with an optional backlight for reading on the bus and train after nightfall.
About five years later I was working on a project where I needed lots of literature and I needed to be mobile, so I took a friend along to help me explain what I wanted in Ukrainian, and went to several copy shops in that city to ask if they could please scan my books and put them on a disk so that I could use them more easily. All we got for our trouble was a few blank stares and hard looks. But now...? Now - I have nearly 300 books on my hard drive!
I hope I don't have to read them all to get through my next project, organizing them and keeping track of them is a bit tricky, (I really do prefer paper and turning pages, cuz I'm not a tree-hugger). I found a pretty good program to help with that,
Calibre.
With this program I can go online and find meta data on most of the books, and reviews. I'm also supposed to be able to search the content of the books through the program. That would be a great feature, but not all the scans are done with text recognition.
Yesterday we spent at least 6 hours on the road, but I was reading most of the time, lucky each trip was under 4 hours so I could charge up my netbook in between travels. I've heard the Kindle has good battery life, but no backlight option, a person would need a flashlight to read in the dark, just like when I was a kid. If I were designing a space alien their eyes would have rays of light coming out of them, if we had illuminating eyes the Kindle wouldn't need a backlight ever, but until it comes with that option I'm sticking with the netbook.
