Another old post just uploaded.
Every time I go on holiday I worry about the amount of books I have. What if I have nothing to read? As a result I always end up with a heavy bag. I then panic on day three of the holiday, that I am going to run out, so I try to buy yet more books. I now own a Sony E-reader. I had only read one book with it before, but I really fell in love with it on this holiday.
The books I read were: Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday, A princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
It the size of a thin paperback book. It is much easier to read than a laptop screen. I had no problem reading it in sunlight.
It can be used to read PDF and word documents. I read about 20% of a PDF bokk on data intensive computing (4th paradim) that was a tribute to james Grey (the famous SQL guy, who was lost at sea recently). It is not very good at graphs. The paper I downloaded from thbe physics archive was a bit mangled, because most of the figures were trashed.
The e-reader stores the last page that was read. It makes reading a book cool, because it does looks as though you are playing a video game.
My main problem with it is the price of the e-books. There are special on-line stores, but the books always seem expensive. I get most of my books from amazon second hand market sellers. I am sure the price will come down. At the moment I pay a lot more in postage.
On the books I read, I have seen many versions of Dracula, so it was interesting to read the original. I liked the way it was made up of journal entries of the different characters.
The book by Faraday on the candle was a transcription of some lectures he had given. He used an explanation of a candle burnt to introduce some ideas about chemistry and the scientific method. he made it exciting, especially when you think that what he talking about was new knowledge, rather than textbook stuff.