DIGITAL READING

I've written a lot about digital publishing lately, bringing whatever news I can find on the revolution in publishing and make no bones about it - it is indeed a revolution, one that's in its very early stages and probably still several years away from total dominance. But, I believe it will come to it. Anyway I've owned my own digital reader for a little over a week now and have had a chance to get to grips with it, plus actually read a couple of books on the thing.

Elonex E-book reader


The gadget came with 100 books preloaded onto the thing and I threw a few ebooks on there myself. Transferring ebooks over to the device is simplicity itself, much like putting music onto an Ipod. It syncs itself up to Adobe's free Digital Editions software and believe me I'm no computer whizz and yet I found both putting books on and deleting them an easy task.

Now when I first started reading on it I found myself unable to get into the story - Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, with the total immersion I manage with printed books but this was to do with having to get used to the way it worked rather than the experience itself. And after a few hours I'd forgotten that I had a piece of cutting edge technology in my hand and I was in a world of white washed fences and wild adventures on the river. You read a page and just click the button at the bottom and in a fraction of a second the page turns. The screen really is tremendous and it has the look and feel of the real printed page.

Another point worth mentioning is I charged the machine for eight hours, as recommended in the instructions, and now eight days later the battery is still showing a full charge. There's also very little weight there and I've got this thing in my pocket with over two hundred books on there.

Now at the moment the Elonex is exclusive to Borders but unlike say Amazon's Kindle it is more versatile in the formats it takes - EPUB, PDF, RTF, even Microsoft Word files will open on it, though the formatting can be a bit odd but if you convert the files to PDF the problem goes away. EPUB is especially welcome as Gutenberg which hold thousands of Public Domain books supports the format.

So will it replace the printed word? Well not yet, not ever really - for a start ebooks are way too expensive considering your not getting anything physical and the look and feel of an actual book can never be replicated electronically. But if I could get the latest bestsellers as ebooks then I would seriously consider buying some of them this way rather than as conventional books. But there's no way I'd pay the current prices for digital books - there's nothing physical there but still they cost virtually the same as the printed version. This is the biggest stumbling block in epublishing at the moment. And is a complicated matter since authors, publishers and distributors will still want to make a living. But for small pressed with limited print runs, digital does seem a better option plus digitally a book never needs to be out of print.

The Elonex is the cheapest E-reader currently on the market and as I've not used Sony's readers nor The Kindle I can't say if it's better or worse. But it does what it's supposed to do and does it well. And at £189.00 I do think it was money well spent.

For the moment most of my reading will still be done with the printed book but I plan to catch up on all those classics that I've never actually read on the Elonex. I enjoyed Tom Sawyer and am going to catch up on Huck Finn next. I've also downloaded Mark Twain's Roughing it from Gutenberg which is something I've always wanted to read. Now if you could buy the latest bestseller for half the price of the printed book I think these readers would indeed dominate the market sooner rather than later.


All those book pictured here come from my personal library - I could put all of them onto this device and not even touch it's 8.000 book capacity. Now that's truly amazing.