Second time’s the charm

I saw “Stuff White People Like” on the bargain rack approximately 37 seconds after it was released, but anybody who was interested was able to see a lot of that content on the web site. His next book seems to have a different focus, so maybe this one will do better.

World’s Truest Venn Diagram

via LauraOlin

Hot Guys Reading Books

Yes, please.

Every now and then, tumblr justifies its existence.

I feel like I’ve read every awful romance novel ever

But somehow I missed these doozies. Maybe it’s because I try to stay away from “the clinch,” but whatever it is, I’m thanking my lucky stars and adding these all to my Not To Be Read list.

So long, farewell

As I mention from time to time, I’m fairly obsessed with books. I get a lot of them from the library, but I buy even more. Some books I only want to read once, and then I’m done with them. Others I keep forever and will reread as the mood strikes me. Sometimes it’s not immediately clear which category a book will fall into, and it’s necessary to keep them around for a while to figure it out. Once I’ve decided that a book is not a keeper, I try to make its purchase pay off for me, anyway. There are a few book-swapping web sites that I belong to. The first, Paperbackswap, is the one I’ve been with the longest (over 3 years!), and I’ve had a good run over there. I joined the other two sites, SwapTree and Bookmooch, this year.

I was pretty happy with both of the newer services when I first joined them, because I got rid of a lot of books really quickly. Even paying postage on so many books didn’t discourage me. Of the three services, SwapTree was the only one where books were exchanged on a one to one basis. With the other services, people would request books from me and I would accrue credits by sending them. At some point in the future, I could use these credits to redeem books that I wanted from other users. Since the whole point of this exercise was to get rid of the books cluttering my house, I figured that I wouldn’t use SwapTree too much, but I actually did about as many trades there as I did on BookMooch.

Then, toward the end of the summer, SwapTree went through a lot of changes. It got a new CEO, and a new name, Swap.com. And just a couple of days ago, I received an email from them stating that they’re going to start charging members a fee for each transaction (on top of postage). Excuse me? Why would I pay to get rid of my books? I could take them to the library, list them on eBay, or try to sell them at a used bookstore. If I wanted to, I could have all of those books out of my house today, at no real cost to myself. I give a big BOO! to Swap, which I’m quitting (and a lot of other people seem to be, too).

This weekend, as if the universe wanted to tell me that I was heading in the right direction, I received two Paperbackswap requests. Take that, Swap!

Overthinking zombies is kind of fun

I enjoy well-told  zombie stories, regardless of their format. Recent zombie stories that I have enjoyed were Zombieland and the book Feed, by Mira Grant. I like the idea behind zombie plots, namely that dead is not always dead, and that lingering in some not-human form isn’t necessarily better than being truly dead. These two works took totally different views of zombiedom, both in terms of how zombies are made and their capabilities, but I enjoyed each of them a lot. Feed, in particular, struck me as one of the standout books for 2010. No, I’m not exaggerating, but then again, I have strange taste in books.

Anyway, although it probably sounds like I do, I do not in fact spend much time thinking about zombies. This guy does, though, and his multi-part post that considers the implications behind the SPEED of zombie movement in different movies puts my zombie-pondering to shame.

Anne Frank is soooo boring

No to me, because I liked her diary (I actually like reading anybody’s diary), but this Salon article about Amazon.com users giving classic books 1-star reviews cracked me up. I will take a gander myself later on and find some other examples.

Why I’m Weird

Because I would read – and enjoy – a book entitled The Doctoral Candidate and the Ravishing Researcher.

First impressions: Barnes and Noble Nook

I read all the time, even when I should be doing other things. I take a ton of books with me on vacation, and as any student/or big-time reader can tell you, lugging around a lot of books gets really old, really quick. I’d been toying around with the idea of getting an e-book reader for a while, and even went so far as to compare the Amazon Kindle, which seems to be the industry standard, to e-readers from Sony and other companies. Nothing really screamed “buy me,” so I put that search on the back burner. I was surprised then, by how fascinated I became when Barnes and Noble announced their Nook. For some reason, it seemed like a better fit for me than a Kindle, which I’ve only briefly seen in action. Why? Now, I really can’t remember, but maybe it was the newness of it. It seemed to me that something newer, which reasonably stood to benefit from the examples of Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s e-book readers, would present the end user with a better product. Is this the case? I don’t know.

The wait

After an agonizing day of going over the pros and cons in my minds, and looking at comparison charts, I decided to buy the Nook the day after it was announced. I waited with baited breath until November 30 (the original estimated ship date), and got really angry when, at 4:30 that day, B&N sent out an email stating that the Nook wouldn’t be delivered until December 10. That was a week and a half away!!! I would have felt better if they’d been upfront about this earlier, as they had to have known that they wouldn’t make their initial market date.

They did try to placate those of us who’d expected a Nook on November 30 with a $10 credit to their online store, which was also an instance of epic failure since, at the time, the B&N online store didn’t allow credits to be used to buy e-books. Barnes and Noble’s real books are usually pricey without their $25/year membership, and I’m not a member; 99% of what I want is cheaper at Amazon, so why in the world would I want to buy a physical book from B&N?? Luckily, B&N finally realized how stupid it was not to allow e-reader owners to buy e-books with the “my bad” credit they’d received, and changed to policy to allow store credits to purchase e-books.

The reality

When I first got my Nook, I was in heaven. I was so happy it had arrived that I tore into the packaging as soon as I got home and saw it on my bed. Unfortunately, the people who made the Nook must have thought that a genius would be opening the package only after it was attacked by a band of feral animals, because the opening process was so difficult that it included instructions. And I still found it hard! Once I got over my worries that my troubles in opening the Nook meant I was too stupid to use it, I let it get fully charged and then started to play around with it.

The things I like about the Nook are manifold:

• It’s insanely portable; I ordered  a case that was back-ordered and hasn’t arrived yet, but it fits perfectly into a quart-sized ziplock bag, so that’s how I’ve been moving it to and fro.
• Changing from the default font to Helvetica Neue made a ton of difference for me, and now the text is perfect for extended periods of reading.
• I like being able to browse B&N and Google Book collections on my Nook, and download items directly to it. Also, anything I buy on Barnes and Noble’s web site is automatically sent to my Nook.

The thing I don’t like about the Nook:

• If I’d posted this yesterday, I would have started with the fact that turning pages on the Nook was noticeably slow. I didn’t want to complain about this, but three seconds to get from one page of a book to the next is certainly something that grows tiresome over the course of 800+ pages. Awesomely, the software on the Nook updated today to version 1.1, and now turning pages is much much faster.
• Turning pages by swiping the touchscreen. I have to say that, for the first week or so that I had my Nook, I found this function almost completely useless. When I tried to change the page using the touchscreen, I would be successfully only about 25% of the time. The Nook guide was pretty useless in figuring out the specific movement that would work every time, as it just said to swipe your finger across the touchscreen (um, thanks). And the instructions didn’t mention that I had to swipe toward the left to turn to the next page. Maybe if most English-language books went from right to left, this would make sense, or even if the Nook’s directional buttons functioned in this way, but they don’t, so it doesn’t. Through trial and error, I finally figured out how to swipe in a way that almost always works, but this was no thanks to B&N.
• Although I’m pleased with the now speedier page-turning process, it feels like Nook symbol has become less responsive with this software update. I wonder if that’s possible, but it seems like I have to press the symbol and the touchscreen harder now in order to awaken them after they’ve fallen asleep. This annoys me.

The verdict

I like my Nook a lot, I just don’t love every part about it. I agree with this Engadget review, that says it’s hard to use and lacks any sort of intuitive interface. I think that David Pogue’s review was overly negative, but that it brought up some valid points. I feel that there was a bit of a learning curve, and I’m now familiar enough with this gadget that I understand and like it for what it is. I don’t know if everybody would feel this way, but I’m glad that I bought my Nook.

And THIS is why I don’t have a Kindle

As you are probably coming to understand, I read all the time. All. The. Time. I am always reading something, be it in the form of a physical book, or more and more frequently lately, on my computer through the New York Public Library‘s ebooks division. I know that a lot of people prefer the heft and smell of physical books, or just can’t stare at a screen for long, but that doesn’t bother me. I’ve flirted with the idea of getting a kindle, but it just seems to be too expensive. Amazon recently dropped the price from $360 to $299, so that’s nice, but each book still runs an average of $10 each. If NYPL or BCCLS, the other library system that I belong to, would work out an arrangement with Kindle that would allow users to borrow and return books, then the initial outlay would be immediately justifiable for me and I’d snap up a Kindle without delay. This seems unlikely though, so I will stick with my free physical and digital library books.

Another thing that gives me pause is the “What ifs” associated with moving to an all-digital book format. This technology isn’t very old, and I think people and companies are still grappling with its possibilities and limitations. Kindle owners rave about how they can download their books wirelessly, but recently they learned the hard way that their beloved wireless transfer system works both ways. So a Kindle content provider maybe-sorta sold editions of 1984 and Animal Farm that it didn’t actually hold the rights for. And when Amazon was alerted to this by the companies that actually do own the rights to those books, they maybe-sorta just yanked them back off of people’s Kindles and issued refunds, without any sort of heads-up. Was that wrong? Should they not have done that? While bypassing the apology all together, Amazon did say that, in the future. books it is found to have sold in error will not be removed remotely from people’s Kindles. The person I felt worst for when reading this article was this kid:

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

I guess I’m also waiting for an e-reader that will do color well and not be so clunky. I love actual books, so I can wait.