My hayfever got worse and worse and now my throat’s so swollen it’s hard to breathe. gah. stupid flowers, stop pollinating my air!
Stuffs to do this week:
- Mail out 4 books for bookmooch!
- Washing machine fees to Norjit!
- Pay some more laybys (xmas presents zomg! i think you guys might end up getting it next year hahahaha)
- read finish my books and review them for LibraryThing. I am now on a backlog of 3 books ~.~
- shove all wintery stuff into the shed properly. Still alot of them hanging around the house T_T
So, the past few days were spent either working or lazing around the house and making poor attempts at tidying up. it’s all falling apart here, really, haha! I am completely giving into my current pasta bake fad, simply because pasta bake is so easy to make and you can put anything in it to make it uber healthy or NOT healthy. Although, I did make a curry baked rice version of that cha-pa-lang everything can throw in version of it too. came out nom-ish too! ^_^
One of the things I did too, was further read about e-book readers and the various different opinion pieces and advice (and whatever else related to that). This has brought up a lot of interesting things to my attention.
The fear of losing traditional bookshops and libraries
This has been discussed to death in various places, some of the reading forums that I have been visiting, others from social media blogs that I sometimes frequent.
This is fairly interesting in many ways. In the past 10 years, the sale of books have slowly been changing, albeit not so much in this direction. Whilst we used to be locked into whatever books our local bookstores choose to sell, with the advent of the internet as a selling zone, companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble have stepped out of their countries to sell books into other countries. This has made lots of books available to us outside of the USA that we might otherwise not be able to easily obtain.
Libraries, too, have changed. In one of the local schools here, the entire library have a small 10 by 10feet section for reference books/short-loans section, while the rest of the original library was converted into a large computer zone. Again, because of the internet (google is the cause!), information can now be easily obtained online. of course, it is hard to tell whether the information is genuine or even useful, but with the correct phrases, a student’s research can be wondefully narrowed. This is highly comparable to asking a student, who might be time strapped, to read through 15 hefty books for research (the minimum) and hoping to find what they need to fulfill their research.
of course, one should think the student should be hardworking to work through those books anyways and educate himself.
What has not changed in these years is the fact that libraries will always hold reference books that can be hard to get elsewhere. Bookstores will always hold books that cannot be supported by text alone. Language books, for example, requires someone to be able to HEAR what they are learning. Cookbooks will need to be accompanied by colorful pictorial compositions to support those who are quite inept at cooking (e.g ME). Books that can be of useful reference might be out of print and rare enough for people to ignore digitalising them.
while our interaction and needs for bookstores and libraries have and will continue to evolve, I would hardly see this as the death of the bookstores and libraries. I see this as an opportunity for bookstores and libraries to evolve as well. When I was young, the library was just a place to borrow books and read. Some places had people reading books to us. Maybe now, it can also be a place to connect booklovers, authors and their fans etc.
Why an e-book device?
I have the iphone, and I have a functioning laptop. It’s a gorgeous laptop, but at 2.4kilos, I had rather cart my books around. My iphone isn’t a bad e-reader either, but it’s strenous for my eyes and something about it’s tiny screen makes me want to smack myself.
I love my books very much. So much so that I have a massive OCD problem about it. One of my friends, who probably don’t remember this now, face the wrath of my OCD back when I was extremely hot headed and young. I loan her the book, it came back a year later, a month after I could have uitilised it to the fullest, with it dog-eared, covered with crumbs and food stains. It looked brand new when I lent it to her, and infact it was almost brand new. I swore at her, and I never properly swore before that, and raged and then I stopped talking to her for years and years.
If I take a picture of my current books now, you will still see most of my OCD side. I say most because I also tend to like reading my books in the toilet. Some of them have… very fatal accidents. My books all look brand new, complete with price tags on them. however, due to time constraints in my life now, you will find that the reason why they look brand new no longer meant that it’s because I cuddle them to sleep. it’s because I actually couldn’t find the time to read them at home. Some of these books are hefty and the subjects they touch are very dry.
Do I have a point? I think you can see it. I am not about to lend someone a $260 device, that’s a starter. No one, me included, can destroy my “book” unless I drop it into the toilet bowl and other manifestations of destroying. On top of that, the “book” will not be hefty and I can cart it around and read it with ease (so I have been told). obviously, looking at some videos, it’s got a bigger screen than my iphone.
Of course, not to mention it’s an additional gadget into my collection of gadgets ^__^v*
I can’t wait to get my hands on the Kindle ~.~
so here’s a couple of alternatives that I couldn’t make up my mind upon: 
