Booking Through Thursday: E-volution

This week's BTT topic is all about e-reading: "E-readers like the Kindle and iPad are sweeping the nation … do you have one? Do you like it? Do you find it changes your reading/buying habits? If you don’t have one, do you plan to?"

I do have an iPad and I do like it. It's not great for blogging, but for Internet surfing and checking email and just playing, it's great. And lately I've been doing more and more e-reading with it, too. I downloaded the Kindle app for free from Amazon, and I've also downloaded several dozen books now -- many of them also free.

It's interesting that these questions came up just now, since yesterday I was reading an article about the results of a German study that found older people read faster and process their reading more efficiently when reading on a tablet -- faster than when reading printed books, or even with a Kindle or other electronic devices. And although the "older people" in the study were even older than moi (but I'm getting there), I'm finding that I do seem to read faster on the iPad than when I'm reading printed books.

I still prefer printed books -- and that was true of the people in the study, too -- but I can definitely see more e-reading in my future.

Friday's List: Samples

I've had my iPad for over a year now, and I still think it's a nifty little device. Pricey, but comes in very handy for travel or those times when I'm away from my main computer. And it's also a very efficient e-reader; in fact, I've looked at the Nook and the Kindle, and I think I really do prefer the iPad (but to each his own, of course). I haven't done a huge amount of e-reading -- just enough to discover (as I figured I would) that I really like reading actual books as opposed to the electronic kind. But one of the really nice things about having the Kindle app (downloaded free from Amazon) is that I've been able to take advantage of Amazon's sampling feature. And that's allowed me to download free samples of interesting-looking books before making up my mind about whether or not to read the whole work. Here's what I've "sampled" so far:

1. The Attenbury Emeralds. Jill Paton Walsh
2. Fall of Giants. Ken Follett
3. A Game of Thrones. George R.R. Martin
4. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Stieg Larsson
5. Henrietta's War. Joyce Dennys
6. In the Garden of Beasts. Erik Larson
7. Leviathans of Jupiter. Ben Bova
8. A Lonely Death: An Inspector Rutledge Mystery. Charles Todd
9. Love You More: A Detective D.D. Warren Novel. Lisa Gardner
10. Miss Hargreaves. Frank Baker
11. Mr. Chartwell. Rebecca Hunt
12. On Borrowed Time. David Rosenfelt
13. Separate Beds. Elizabeth Buchan
14. West of Here. Jonathan Evison
15. What the Night Knows. Dean Koontz
16. The Winter Ghosts. Kate Mosse
17. Wish You Were Here. Stewart O'Nan
18. Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel
19. 13, rue Therese. Elena Mauli Shapiro

The samples are usually somewhere around twenty-five to fifty pages, or the first few chapters of each book. But after all these downloads, I've actually gone on to read just one of the titles (Mr. Chartwell). I've got another downloaded (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), but haven't read it yet. This doesn't mean I'm not interested in reading the other books I've sampled -- just haven't had the time yet. Maybe if I cut back on all that sampling....

Tuesday Thingers: Listing e-Books

Been a while since I participated in the Tuesday Thingers group, so I thought I'd check back in. This week, Wendi (of Wendi's Book Corner) has some interesting questions about e-books:

Do you read ebooks? Have you used Library Thing to record ebooks in your book shelves? Whether you do or don't currently read ebooks, if you read one, will you be including it in your book shelves, and will you tag it as an ebook?

Well, I don't have an e-book reader, so any e-book reading I'd do would have to be done online. And I haven't done much of that. I think I've read three books online at Project Gutenberg, and I'm reading another right now (The Lair of the White Worm, by Bram Stoker). Gutenberg is a great source of older and out of print works – they have a wonderful list. But I'm not really a fan of reading long works on the computer, so it has to be something I really can't get anywhere else before I'm likely to go that way.

But if I did have a Kindle or other reader, and started acquiring e-books, I suppose I'd go ahead and catalogue them in my LT listing, along with all my print books. At least I don't see any reason not to. And then, yes, I'd definitely give them the "e-book" tag, along with my usual tags about genres, etc.