Posts Tagged ‘books’

When my two and a half year old Bookeen Cybook ebook reader decided to end it all and present me with a screen that looked like a barcode, I was a bit miffed. I really enjoyed reading on the little device, so I called Bookeen and said, can you fix it?

Yes we can, they answered.

Oh good, I said. How much? At this they sucked air in through their metaphorical teeth (a bit like milk teeth only more expensive) and said €150.

Blimey. That’s over half the amount that I had paid for it.

Sorry, they said, not sounding sorry at all, it’s the display chip, it’s got a timer so the minute it goes out of warranty it’s like Schrodinger’s chip, both fried and not fried at the same time and it’s only a matter of time until someone, i.e. you, opens the case and collapses the bibliowave function and Bob’s your monkey’s uncle and well, you can see can’t you, or not, because your display chip is fried, possibly covered in vinegar too.

Blinded by science, and possibly slightly paraphrasing what they said, I put away my fried display chipped ebook reader and thought, oh well.

Until Amazon lowered the price of their Kindle to 108 quid.

Then a little voice started to pipe up, go on, you know you want to, you read a lot, it’ll be great, go on…

Well you can guess really can’t you?

Fried Cybook and shiny Kindle

I got the Kindle, for about what the repair would have cost me. And it’s great. It’s a breeze to buy books from Amazon (less of a breeze to rip the DRM from them and store a local copy but not impossible), a snap to convert books I have already (since the DRM has been burned off them long ago to allow me to read my own books on my own machine) and it even has wifi, and a web browser, that, while slow, actually works okay.

So thanks little voice in my head (and Liz who contributed a few go ons), now what were you saying about another camera?

Cuando mi lector de libros electrónicos Cybook de Bookeen decidió a suicidarse con solo dos años y medio, y me presentó una pantalla que pareció un código de barras, me sentí molesto. Había disfrutado leer en el dispositivo, así que llamé a Bookeen y les pregunté, ¿podéis arreglarlo? Sí, podemos, me respondieron.

Bueno, dije ¿Será cuanto?

En aquel momento aspiraron tras los dientes metafóricos (como los dientes de leche pero mas caros), y me dijeron 150€.

¡Ostras! Es casi la mitad de lo que pague.

Lo siento, me dijeron (pero no parecían así) es el chip de visualización, ese chip tiene un temporizador para que al momento que caduque la garantía es como el chip de Schrodinger, queda frito y no frito a la vez, y solo es una cuestión de tiempo hasta que alguien, es decir, tu, abres la funda y se colapsa la función biblio-onda e ya está hecho y ves, o no por que el chip queda frito, incluso con vinagre (como comemos el famoso fish and chips en Inglaterra).

Parafraseo un poco lo que han dicho. Cegado por la ciencia, lo guardó el lector de libros electrónicos con el chip de visualización frito, pensé bueno, no importa.

Hasta que Amazon bajó el precio del Kindle a 140€.

En aquel momento una pequeña voz empezó a decirme, vamos, venga, sabes que lo quieres, lees mucho, será fantástico, venga…

Pues, puedes adivinar lo que pasó ¿no?

Compré el Kindle y me costó mas o menos lo que me hubiera costado la reparación del otro. Esta bien, es muy fácil comprar libros de Amazon (menos fácil quitar el DRM, para guardar una copia, pero no imposible), es facilísimo convertir los libros que tengo ya (porque el DRM había sido quitado hace siglos para dejarme leer mis libros por mi dispositivo) aun tiene WiFi, y un navegador web que funciona lento pero bien.

Entonces, gracias a la vocín en mi cerebro (y a Liz quien contribuyó unas “vengas”), bueno ¿que me decías sobre una camera nueva?

Cover from “El circo del Desaliento” version 02 Originally uploaded by david rubín.

Anyone who knows me more than a little will know that I read a bit. Okay, that should be a lot. I read a lot. So I just thought I’d share what my current ‘on the go’ pile looks like. I’m trying to read in Spanish but I don’t always stick to the plan.

El circo del Desaliento (The circus of discouragement: the photo is the cover) by David Rubín. This is the second of his I’ve read recently, the first was the fantastic ‘La tetería del Oso Malayo’ (The teahouse of the Malasian bear). He’s a Galician whose stories tend to mix pathos, loss, missed opportunities with a bit of hope and optimism somewhere in there (sometimes very far in there). If you see any of his stuff in translation it’ll be worth looking at.

Mafalda: Cova lent me a massive tome with all of the Mafalda strips which ran from the mid sixties to the mid seventies in Argentina.

No he venido aquí a hacer amigos (I didn’t come here to make friends, misadventures of an IT consultant): I was in the library and trying to avoid anything which looked like literature. This one begins with the protagonist driving north with his dead boss in the passenger seat of his BMW… the Spanish is not too difficult either.

El principito (The Little Prince): this was from leer-e, a Spanish e-book site. It’s many many years since I read the original.

The Ungoverned by Vernor Vinge: He’s a visionary SF writer, and this is the second in a series based firmly in the extrapolation of certain physics ideas. Mind expanding.

How to play blues ukulele. Pretty self explanatory really, gotta have a hobby.

Liz bought me this fine Spanish hardback edition of Watchmen for my birthday. I know it pretty much by heart in English and this will be great for learning some idiomatic Spanish… it should also help when the film comes out here on March 6th. I am looking forward to it just a little (with fingers crossed, please don’t screw it up).

When I used to watch Star Trek, one of the things I really wanted was one of those nifty tablets that the short skirted PA used to hand to Kirk. I used to use my Etch-a-Sketch to pretend but it wasn’t the same. Then when the Next Generation came along the tablets had gotten sleeker and I still wanted one.

Having read books on my Palm for the last four years I can confirm that the small screen and the back lighting make it a tiring experience, and the fact that I didn’t have to lug a ton of books around was the only thing that made it worthwhile.

So I’ve been following the e-book reader market with some interest. I like the look of the Sony e-reader but it’s not available, I like the iliad but it’s a fortune, I’m not so keen on the Amazon Kindle, largely because it does too much, I don’t need phoned updates and I don’t want to subscribe to things. I just want to read books.

At last… the Bookeen Cybook gen3, which I stumbled across when I was doing almost random ebook searches. It reads mobipocket files (one of the palm formats I already used) it reads html and text files (and pdf files if they’re more text than images). It weighs less than a 400 page paperback and the screen… oh my. E-ink is just lovely. This photo shows you the cybook on top of a page of photocopied text. The screen is legible, no backlighting so no flicker, no juice needed except to turn the pages (they claim up to 8000 page turns per charge).

It’s not perfect, finding your book is slow if you have lots on your card, but the reading experience is a joy. The screen appears solid, just like paper, just with a slightly lower contrast ratio (more like financial times than a glossy fashion mag).

It’s like being in the future, bring on the flying cars.