Sunday, January 05, 2003

Books, Ebooks, and Writing About Books Spent the weekend posting to Electrobooks@YahooGroups and writing more ebook reviews for KnowBetter http://www.knowbetter.com. Someone at IRTI http://www.irti.net contacted me that not only does the company sell the Sony digital recorder along with many other adaptive devices for the blind and low-vision consumer, but he developed a manual which contains a number of significant workarounds and such to access most of the functions of the device. I took a look at the manual Jeff Simco at IRTI developed, and it is very impressive, allowing the blind user to use most of the functions of this great device. Discovered another ebook seller which sells ebooks in the accessible Palm Reader format, and even offers some ebooks in MS Word and HTML: http://www.bookbooters.com. I purchased Rushdie's collection of essays and have been devouring it in large bytes since last night. Rushdie's non-discriminatory attitude toward everything from "The Wizard of Oz" to new writers is refreshing, and a nice dose of optimism compared to the cultivated cynicism of most literati. I highly recommend this collection to readers and writers, especially those interested in developing style. Electrobooks--the blind readers mailing list I post to--got its first spin-off: VIBWriters, a mailing list for visually-impaired and blind writers. Look for it at YahooGroups.com, I can never remember the long url for Yahoo groups... I noticed that the ease of purchasing and downloading ebooks has begun to spoil me. Today I got caught up in the frustrating business of trying to download a couple of books from Audible.com. When I first began using Audible at the beginning of last year, it seemed simple enough. Over the past year, however, as I have discovered more ebook purchasing options, the entire convoluted series of logins, downloads, software managers, and such, at Audible is becoming more time-consuming than I have the patience for. Let's not even get into the attempt to burn the book to CD. How quickly we get blase about the wonders of tech. I'm ready to get more blase now. Reading Neil Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ was probably a mistake: I keep comparing the time and effort most ebooks require to access against the ease and interactivity, not to mention individualization, of the interactive book in Diamond Age. Am I the only person who find Diamond Age to be her favorite Stephenson book? 2:07:47 PM    comment []