The E-Smudge of Death

E-readers have their perks, but books have their permanence. What to do?

I’ve long been a fan of the artifact known as the book. However, I've also been rather excited by technologies that allow me to carry hundreds – perhaps thousands – of books with me relatively easily, so that, when I travel, I not only have a book to read, but I also have a back-up book, or two, or three, or a hundred.

Right now, for example, I've got five books that I'm in the middle of reading/listening to. Two of them are physical books, two are digital books, and one is an audio book. Two rooms of my house have physical books that await my presence, I've got a book to listen to while commuting or going for a run, and I have a couple of others I can read in short snippets while on the go.

Advertisements in e-books threaten to take away one of our last commercial-free cultural spaces. Read all about it here.

Life has been good for this life-long reading nerd. Until a few days ago, that is.

Having been without a vehicle lately, I've been taking the bus to work, which has been a pleasant experience. Walking to the bus stop, I’m able to listen to an audio book. But when I'm sitting on the bus, I enjoy the experience of reading. And since the physical books I'm reading right now are rather thick, and thus more difficult to stuff into my laptop bag, I've been taking my Sony PRS-505 with me, instead.

I've owned my Sony reader for a couple of years now – it's an earlier model, but I prefer its design to the more recent models. One of the things I like more about the 505 version is that the "page turn" option appears on both the right-hand side of the device as well as the bottom left, which means that, no matter which hand I’m holding the e-reader with, I’m able to easily turn the page without having to use my other hand. This is useful whether I’m lying in bed with one arm behind my head or standing on a bus or train and holding on to something to keep from flying forward at sudden stops.

Is CanLit in trouble in the age of the e-reader? Find out what Mark Lefebvre has to say about it here.

Life was good with my Sony e-reader and its e-ink screen. It’s a nice, lightweight device, measuring roughly the height and width of a mass-market paperback, about a quarter of an inch thick, and perhaps a pound in weight.

The e-ink experience of reading is pleasant on the eyes. The joy of being able to carry more than one e-book, listen to music, or even store pictures on the device were neat novelties – I didn't often take advantage of most of those options, but they were nice to have, particularly when showing off the e-reader to others.

This version of the e-reader didn't have WiFi. No, it wasn't as convenient as being able to download new reading material on the fly; to put new content on it, I needed to hook it up to my computer with a USB device and download or move content over to it. This wasn’t a big hassle, and having a handheld device that did not connect to the internet was a benefit, in my mind. Enough distractions abound without having to deal with my own temptation to be reading email or checking my RSS feed or a social network.