Friday, November 23, 2007

Week 9 # 22 ebooks

NetLibrary
I successfully set up an account with NetLibrary, which was very easy. I searched for a few books which I guessed were long out of copyright, such as Little Women and Pride and Prejudice, and added them to my Favorites. There are many books by authors such as Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde available. The Anne of Green Gables series is there too.
I also searched for Shakespeare and saw that there are a lot of Cliffs Notes on Shakespeare’s plays which would be very handy for students of English literature, particularly since the text of all these ebooks is searchable, so it would be very easy to bring up a particular quote, rather than searching through a hard copy.
There were also many ebooks on computer software such as Photoshop, which would be very convenient to access if you ran into a problem and needed a quick answer. I can see I will spend many happy hours on NetLibrary – one thing just leads to another.

Kindle
There has been some publicity in the media this week about Kindle, the electronic book reader, so I had been doing some reading about it before it popped up in this exercise. It seems very pricy at $US399 but presumably like all new technology it won’t take long for the price to tumble if it catches on. It would be great to have on an overseas trip if it can indeed hold 200 books and last 30 hours before recharging. I would definitely be interesting in owning one if it lives up to its promise.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It is amazing how popular those cliff notes are