Tuesday 10 August 2010

Invaluable Travel Companion

Good morning everyone!  I've been posting all weekend, but I haven't forgot that today is Tuesday!  Actually, truth be told, I've been having a hell of a time remembering that it's Tuesday; there's nothing quite like a long weekend to mess with your perception of the week's stately march.

Since I've already told you all about my trip, I thought I'd talk a little bit about my newest toy.  I'd mentioned this weekend that I spent some time with my book... which was only slightly accurate.  This weekend I was travelling with an e-book reader.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, e-book readers are small, thin, lightweight devices with a special type of screen (they call them e-ink screens) that are designed to look like ink on paper.  Unlike an LCD screen they don't throw any light, so you need a light source, just like with a real book.  However, since it's a softer look, with no direct light emitting from it it's very easy on the eyes.  Just like a real book you can sit and read for hours without eye strain.

Here are a couple pictures that illustrate the size of the device:




































So, as you can see, it's pretty easy to carry around.  In fact, I found on Sunday that it fit perfectly into the chest pocket of the shirt I was wearing.

The advantage to a device like this over a traditional book is that it really is very small and light, and unlike standard paper, I can a whole library on that thing.  It came pre-loaded with 100 books, which only take up a little more than 10% of the 1GB built in storage, and it has an SD-card slot in it, so it can be expanded with another 4GB of memory, bringing the grand total to 5GB.  If the size of the 100 books that are currently loaded is any indication that means that I could have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5000 books in my pocket.  No easy task with old-school paper.

There are dozens of these devices on the market right now.  Arguably the most famous would be Amazon's Kindle, which by all accounts is a spectacular device, loaded with features.  It's also incredibly expensive.  I'm using the Kobo e-reader, which is sold at Chapters and represents the other side of the spectrum from the Kindle; it's not loaded with bells and whistles, it pretty much just reads e-books, and at $150 it's amongst the cheapest e-book readers on the market.

Graydyn has been using Sony's e-book reader for awhile now, just so that he has something to read on the subway to and from work.  He raves about his, and it's been serving him very well.  A great thing about both of our e-readers is the incredible battery life.  I think in the months that Gray has been using his, and keep in mind that's probably 1 to 1.5 hours of reading every weekday, I think he's only had to charge it 2 or 3 times.

Well, that's my travel gadget suggestion for today.  I absolutely adore mine, and if you enjoy having a book with you while you travel I think this is a fantastic option.

2 comments:

Jabbles said...

They do seem rather cool, I am just not sure I would really use it all that much.
The only thing I have an issue with such technology, well not the technology itself is the cost of books, music, movies in digital format is pretty much the same if not more that the hardcopy version.
I realize that printing one book out of a run of many thousands really isn't that much money but the shipping, storage, retail floor space to add to the cost, yet you don't really save getting an electronic version. I do realize servers aren't free either, just a little annoyance of mine.

Colin Young said...

Yeah, I think that the pricing schemes for all things digital are ridiculous right now. Like you said, there are a lot of ways in which they are saving money, but instead of passing a portion of those savings on to the consumer and generating interest in these new ways of getting our entertainment they just focus on raising their profit margins. Sad really.