I went and bought myself a toy…

If I worked for someone else and finished a big project, I’d get a bonus of some sort. Or at least a pat on the back. Alas, I work for myself, and I’d hurt myself if I tried that pat-on-the-back thing. So I have developed a habit of going out and buying myself a tech-toy of some sort. Well, not always. I have a nice collection of knives, too. I might have been inclined to buy myself a really nice bottle of Scotch, but I don’t like drinking alone. Don’t want to become one of those stereotypical writers, after all. (I’d have to start writing noir fiction, get used to blonde floozies throwing themselves at me and… wait, let me rethink this…)

What I snagged was one of the Sony e-readers, the Touch edition (PRS-600). It’s an e-ink device that would fit inside a DVD case if I needed a carrying case for it. Six inch diagonal screen, touch sensitive, with a couple of buttons. It can play music, takes Sony memory sticks or SD cards and has to be plugged into a computer to load books onto it. It reads epub, which is going to be the lingua franca of electronic books and between Gutenberg, GoogleBooks and other sites, there’s plenty of material to load into it.

I got it for two reasons. The first is that I need a development platform for checking epub editions of my work. There are a few public domain software packages that will turn documents into epub. They require some HTML programming knowledge to make them work well, but that’s okay. I’m not afraid of HTML, and have some good books that show me how to deal with that stuff. I’ve already learned how to indent paragraphs so I don’t have to have a spare line between paragraphs in every document. (I think that just looks tacky.)

The second is just to see how well e-ink devices work. This one does really well. The refresh rate is pretty quick, and the Touch does allow you to swipe your finger over the screen to move from page to page. It also has buttons to do that. And it’s got good software for making notes on books, either by typing them on a virtual keyboard (which is kind of slow) or writing them out like a note, using a stylus. Either one works well enough, as does a cut and paste function for pulling paragraphs or quotes you want to remember. I also like that it has two onboard dictionaries. If you don’t know a word, you double-tap on it and a definition appears at the bottom of the screen. If you want to read more info on the word, tap an icon and you get the whole dictionary page.

Graphics only appear in gray-scale, but things don’t look too bad—especially illustrations originally in black and white.

And the device fits inside a quart-sized ziploc bag, so it can be read in the tub. In fact, the only difficulty I have reading it is because of the glass plate over the e-ink screen. My eyes aren’t quick at shifting focus, but if I pull on reading glasses, it’s all good.

All that being said, and given that I carry my iPod Touch around for reading (and other things everywhere), I like the device and thinks it does its job admirably well. The epub format could use some updating, but that’s what one gets when you leave esthetic design to programmers. It functions, too, and is fairly easy to format for. This makes it very easy for beginning authors to turn out electronic work that will function on almost every ebook reader, and that’s a good thing.