Friday, September 28, 2012

Discussion Staion Opens!

Well I can finally reveal the project I and several  friends have been working on for a long time! A new discussion friendly web site for "Books, Films, TV shows and More"! It is called Discussion Station and can be found at Discussionstation.com ! We are opening in the discussion area with  The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling. You will also find other book talk, as well as news reports, the funny Quibbler magazine and much more. We are hoping to come the place to go to feed your need to talk about literature, films and TV shows. Please take a look and join in the fun!  Have fun posting and make sure to leave comments here about your experience!

Saturday, September 8, 2012

E-Readers - The Other Side

As promised, I come today to discuss what I don't like about my e-reader - specifically my Kindle. Let's start with trying to find the book that you bought a month ago when you were in the throes of another book and didn't want to read the new book at that time. When you finally remember - somewhere back there in your mind that you bought the book - you can't remember the tittle. That makes you do the rounds of all the books on your home page and beyond. You hunt and hunt and have to bring up every book or if your savvy enough find the right button to bring up the book description. Finally you have found the right book! Then your not so sure that you want to read that book at the moment and you start again on your hunt for an appropriate book to fit your mood. Seems a whole lot easier to just run one's finger across books on a shelf, and in picking up a book, to read the blurb on the back of the cover to know what it is about.

Let's say you do finally find the book you wish to read. As I really get into the prose, I invariably want to physically turn the page! That is, I start to turn over the e-reader rather than punch the forward button! It seems to happen a lot to me and I am grateful that no one but me seems to notice! Then there is the quest for a name or fact that was seamlessly bypassed pages ago. You come across something on the page you are on and think, "Who is this character?" "Is this the city he was born in, or is this the city he is now in?" To find out the fact that you know you read somewhere back a few pages - the hunt begins. You flip the back-button several times - maybe a lot of times - and finally find the answer! Then you have to punch the  forward-button again and find where you left off. It's quite the pain as compared to easily flipping back a page or two with your fingers maintaining your place where you were with your other hand.

And don't get me started about using a book on your e-reader for a book club discussion. Goodness! Trying to keep characters straight and find your favorite passage or a fact that you want to present to the group is torture! Same thing goes if you wish to do research from an e-book. All that punching of buttons to find what you want is ridiculous. One can't even get page numbers to track where things are in the book!

Then there is the inconvenience of sharing a book. You have discovered the best book ever and after you have read it, you want to make sure your friends read it. But it is on you Kindle! In the old fashion realm of hard copy books, one just popped the book into your purse and took it to the person to read. You lent it too them. Ha! Try doing that with a book on your e-reader! It's one thing to lend a book to someone and another to lend your entire library including the current book you are now reading to a friend! You can only gush about the book and have no way to share it, on a practical basis,  with another person unless you physically give them your e-reader - Fat Chance!

Sigh! I really do enjoy my Kindle, but I certainly do have 'issues' with it that I haven't been able to resolve completely. Please feel free to share your 'issues' with e-readers. I'd love to hear from you!