E-reader Rage

I, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, received an e-reader for Christmas. As a professional skeptic, I was wary of the device. Then I noticed the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy preview in the Books list, preloaded onto the reader, and my skepticism was gone. "I can read Hitchhiker's Guide on this," I said. "This is the single greatest invention in human history."

Eager to test out my new e-reader after devouring the Hitchhiker's preview (and scratching my head at the multiple German books also preloaded), I was happy to discover that our local library had ebooks available for download through MyMediaMall. Upon signing into this system, I told it to display all available titles. It displayed 20 books, the most interesting of which was Window Treatments and Slipcovers for Dummies, though Divorce ran a close second.

I, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, received an e-reader for Christmas.

Ebooks are still a developing technology, and evidently people are still clinging to the old ideas of distribution. In particular, I am stunned by MyMediaMall's decision to set finite limits on the number of copies of a book a library can carry. For our local library, every book has at most 2 copies. Combine this with the rush of people with e-readers, and there are no books left -- with very few exceptions, in particular the hundreds of elementary math workbooks.

I imagine technology-haters feel rather vindicated by this. "See," they say, "these fancy Kindles will never replace paper books." And the worst part is, I can't really argue with them.


Aside: I am "fortunate" enough [see my fingers?] to own the Sony Reader Pocket Edition PRS-300. I will not whine about its lack of Wi-Fi, lack of a keyboard, lack of conveniently located page turn buttons, lack of annotation capabilities, lack of PDF resizing, legendarily slow loading times, low-contrast screen, disproportionate power consumption while in sleep mode, or the utterly crippled manager software. Not here, at least. What I will whine about is the fact that you can't have PDF and EPUB library ebooks on the device at the same time. No, even that isn't so bad. What bothers me is that Sony refuses to acknowledge this as a glitch, instead explaining it away with "Load all the books of one type, then go back to your computer after reading all of them and load all the books of the other type." After the Playstation Move, I suppose this is just par for the course.


(To be fair, Nook support for library ebooks is also garbage from what I've heard, and the Kindle...well, the Kindle has an entirely different set of problems.)