Week 9, Thing 22 - eBooks

Wow - I feel like I have been away from this community for a very long time! Blame a heavy rehearsal schedule for a performance, kid home from college fighting for on-line time, a cold and a loooong book fair. I am terrified to look at my Google Reader as I suspect all of you have been busy at finishing and posting. I will have LOTS to read. Today, my tongue is no longer dragging on the tarmac so I think I can finish this course. YAY!

Hmmm ... eBooks. I first entered the realm of "not a book" when my husband gifted me with an audio book of Pride and Prejudice. That experiment went well so I tried some contemporary titles. Then a student's parent pulled up next to me at a red light on a warm spring day. Windows wide open, I was enjoying Billy Straight. The, shall we say expressive, language caused said parent to take a long measuring look at me and that was the end of that. Talk about caving to censorship!

I next encountered "not a book" at rehearsal where a fellow soprano was reading on what looked to me like a PDA. It was an eBook reader and while it look rather cool, the screen was gray and the letters black so the contrast wasn't all that tempting. What's more, as a person who suffers from astigmatism, the movement of the words as they scrolled caused (as my daughter says) "the worms in my stomach to start partying." Let's face it, I love my old fashioned, tree-killing, and generally ecologically unfriendly blocks of paper and text.

While waiting in a doctor's office, I had the chance to read a very long article on Amazon's new Kindle ... or maybe it was new at the time because all the periodicals were suffering from advanced age ... as was I as I waited. I was impressed by the thought behind the product - and the fact that it addressed the issue of contrast - was shaped like a book to add some tactile pleasure to the experience, stuff like that. The article also addressed issues of storage - where do bibliophiles (is that the right word) store all their treasures? Cost was also considered - for those who purchase books, an eBook is significantly cheaper. It was certainly something to mull over.

Because life is serendipitous, along came this assignment. Despite my forays into the world of Web 2.0, I found the World eBook Fair to be somewhat intimidating. Strange coming from the keyboard of a person who just spent five days trapped in the world of Scholastic! I seemed to get a huge number of hits for my searches, despite trying to tailor them and that turned me off. I liked much better, the sub-catalogs on the site like the Alex Catalogue, Author's Community Collection and Childrens eBook Collection - though you'd be better off doing research on children's literature rather than trying to find something to read that's much more current than the turn of the century.

I found LibriVox to be rather neat and enjoyed Aesop's Fox and Grapes which was read by a volunteer with a smooth and expressive voice. Such short and well done audios would be of great use in a classroom, not only for sight-impaired students or those who do best when reading along, but could be used as demonstrations for teaching children to read with expression to engage an audience. (It's in the Frameworks, I swear!)

I checked out the Best Places to get Free Books site and found two amusing sites. Book Crossing reminded me of the elementary school practice of leaving a teddy bear in an airport and seeing where he ends up as travelers pick him up and send postcards from his various destinations. It was interesting to see that the site tracks real old-fashioned books vs. eBooks. LibraryElf is a disorganized person's dream by keeping track of an entire family's worth of books from various libraries. I have solved that problem by putting my due dates on the kitchen calendar and keeping the books on top of my dresser, but we can't all be anal-retentive.