Spent the weekend puttzing around with Facebook and attending the first year of Suzuki Strings concert. Also started watching Deadwood. I knew I would like it and sure enough I do. I started with the first episode of season two. I was on the train and it was rainy out. I just needed to tune out and wanted to watch some t.v. so I did. It was perfect! When I got home I raced to Thomas Video and rented the first season.

So I just had to say I was wrong for slamming the readers for not having The Road available because they do here at The Road

It may be telling that I have yet to pick up the Iliad and start trying to use it as a reader. It may be telling that I turned on the Sony reader almost as soon as it was in my hands and started to load things onto it...only a few burps with the install of their updates. I had to uninstall the software and start over and not apply the update. There is nothing I hate more than an update that makes the thing it is updating stop working altogether.

I have heard people say that the Iliad is hard to approach as a non-technically minded user. Even the somewhat technically are intimidated by it and say things like there isn't anything to load onto it.

Nevertheless, the Iliad sits on my desk for one reason or another. A $1000.00 experiment waiting to be tested.

Our blog has started on the BookNet site. Michael started it off with a bang. Now we're all too intimidated by the audience and the quality, never mind that we are all busily reading all that stuff you can't get easily with an electronic reader. For instance, is one of the highest selling fiction books, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, available on the Sony reader, or the Iliad?

So anyway, I am the perfect candidate for using one of these pocket electronic libraries. I commute an hour and a half to work and lug a lot of reading material - not to mention a laptop - back and forth 3 hrs every day. My pack probably weighs close to 30lbs. I love to read! My tastes are varied, I go through cycles. I will read business books, math books, poetry, fiction, science, science fiction, cookbooks, gardening books, spiritual stuff, political, books like Fast Food Nation, Botany of Desire, Pattern Language, How Buildingd Learn, The Ingenuity Gap, Envisioning Information, The Sparrow, The Road, and I am a follower of Earthseed. I love the confused persons dummie guides to Statistics! (oh yeah and don't forget all of those amazing computer books from Pearsons). So how do I fulfill my reading desires with one of these devices?

This weekend I swear I will start looking at the Iliad. But I can't do what Michael did and swear off the printed page for an extended stay in London. Just can't do it.

E-readers: preliminary report
We received our ereaders this week and just a couple of early observations. First off it cost a lot of money for the Iliad reader from irex. The total cost Cdn. was almost 1000 dollars! That is 3x the cost of the Sony reader. $120.00 of that was for shipping. O.K. that is too much. The sad part is that the handling fee was only $8 and gst and pst made up the rest. Ouch. It remains to be seen if the extra cost is actually worth it.

The Sony reader came with excerpts of books which is about as useful as reading the back of a book. I mean why bother. Include the whole text or nothing. I got a public domain copy of Vanity Fair and loaded that on and also loaded some word documents which so far has been the best use of the reader. Technical documents make a lot of sense on the readers.

I'm not crazy about the usability of the form factor for the Sony reader. There are things I want to do like scroll the page that you just can't do and it is frustrating.

More on the software and form factor later.