My First Pocket E-Reader
My first portable e-reader was this Toshiba Pocket PC. It’s a bit heavy and fat to fit in a pocket but it fit in my purse and held it’s battery power for longer than I could tolerate reading a back-lit screen. It’s great for reading in the dark. I had Microsoft Reader, Adobe Reader, and Mobipocket Reader installed. I kept libraries on compact flash cards that fit in a slot at the top. It worked well because I could pop my card in the card reader on my desktop PC or on my laptop and pick up where I’d left off in any book as I moved between devices. It…
- Carry On Tuesday, contest, flashdrive library giveaway, free e-books, Nara Malone, Personal, read an e-book week, Tiger's Tale
What’s so amusing?
“ Seven Little Tigers Seven little tigers jumping on the bed, one fell off and lost her head. I know. I know. I’ve lost my head. That rhyme has been running through my mind since my shipment of flash drives for the Read an E-Book Week great pocket library giveaway arrived. I hear these little girl, sing-song voices in my head and it makes me smile. If I were young enough to jump on the bed without damage to the ceiling, the bed, or me, I’d be there. I’m so excited about next week. I know this is Carry-on Tuesday and encouraging each other is what we do, but I’m…
- book design, E-books, ebooks, Immersive Fiction, interactive books, interactive fiction, myebooks, read an e-book week, writer's block, writing
Building Better E-books
Why don’t we have tons of dynamic, interactive, visually stunning e-books? The potential has been there for years. It has been there since project Gutenberg launched its e-text repository. It has grown with the first experiments in hypertext fiction and interactive adventure stories. The development of programming languages and scripts, advances in graphic design using HTML and CSS, all opened the doors to possibilities for building better books. Yet when I downloaded Calibre the other night and finally catalogued all of my 1,016 e-books, I was struck by how little evolution we’ve seen in the book. Most were plain text. A few had pictures. At one time websites were just text…