Isn't He Sweet? My New E-reader

My Jeremy is the sweetest guy in the world.

Yesterday I received a box and inside was a present from him. It was an e-book reader, a device about the size of a paperback book, but thinner, that allows you to download books (e-books) onto it and read them. According to the box, depending on file size, you can store between 80 and 160 books on it. There’s supposed to be lots of titles to choose from. This is a Sony machine and they have their own “e-book bookstore” but maybe you can buy them from other sources too. Not sure how that works just yet. But I was poking around online, and I gather that it’s becoming increasingly common for publishers to publish books in both print and e-book formats. There are some publishing houses that only publish e-books, but they don’t seem to have a very good reputation in the publishing industry yet. From what I understand they don’t have good fiscal responsibility, sell poor quality books, and tend to be “here today, gone tomorrow.”

If you’re interested in learning more about e-readers, this site has some reviews of different models and manufacturers.  Each word in the previous sentence goes to a different article or review on that site.  There’s more stuff there, but that’s all I was able to find and save URLs to before the friendly DOD computer system caught up with what I was doing (looking at blogs) and blocked the website.  Blogs are dangerous, don’tcha know.

I haven’t really had a chance yet to power it up and see how it works, but I look forward to doing that.  I hope I’ll be able to download some books I’ll enjoy.  I was looking at Sony’s online ebookstore last night and it seemed most of the titles fall into the category of literary fiction, which we all know means “highbrow fiction that’s mainly about somebody’s abusive past and/or unhappy marriage, has no plot, is actually about the meaninglessness of life, and is really boring.  The only redeeming features are an interesting title, good cover art, and pretty prose–if you’re into those sorts of things.”  I hope they have some good genre fiction.  I looked up this author and only found two books.  She’s written 30+.  Not a good sign if you ask me.  I haven’t looked up any other authors yet.  Hopefully my favorite author, Terry Pratchett, will be well represented.  If not, hopefully I can buy ebooks from other places.  Not sure about that because I’m not sure about the “proprietary format” stuff.  Will have to learn, I guess.

But the coolest thing about this present is that Jeremy had it inscribed (or engraved–whatever you want to call it).  Right on the front at the bottom it says:

To my creative wife Rachel

Who treasures good books

 Isn’t that sweet?

See?  He is the sweetest guy in the world.