E-Books: Not My Favorite.

I recently had my first run-in with the notorious new trend of e-books. Both Random House and Simon & Schuster have e-books available online for purchase online (at randomhouse.com, adult tiles run for $11.99 and kid’s books run for $4.99; at simonsays.com, the list price is generally $11.99 – they only have adult titles in e-book format – but the online price is $7.99), but I was searching for a free e-book. Some sites offer a limited selection of free e-books, and they do have them – once you pay the subscription fee – and other websites like free-ebooks.net do offer free e-books once you become a member. I, however, had a major problem with the downloads at free-ebooks.net. I downloaded the necessary reader program with ease, but when I tried downloading actual e-books, all of the files were corrupt and none of them would play (I tried 3 different titles). Many websites offer free e-books but only provide a small preview of the book for free, with full viewing available after payment. The website I ended up finding was sharewareebooks.com, site with a pretty good selection of e-books, especially in the children’s section, where I navigated through several classic titles until I found one that piqued my interest: The Story of the Pig by Ion Creanga. I can’t say the story was too interesting, but the process of getting and reading the e-book was fascinating. After downloading the DNL Reader (simple to install and use, which was nice, and on DSL, it only took a moment) I downloaded the actual book title to my computer (which also took only a minute or two). I clicked on the file and the e-book automatically came up, looking like a one-page spread with the cover displayed from the top of my screen to the bottom (it didn’t go wide-screen, but took up the proportionate amount of space on the screen). One thing I personally was perturbed with was that the program does not cover your desktop, so I had a picture of a Russian-ish royal court and a pig perched on a stair before a princess with all my icons and my buddy list behind (for me, it was distracting). The image was crisp and clear, as if I was looking at the physical book’s illustrations, and on the edge of the page I could see the shadow line from where the book was held open to be scanned (which I found nice as a fan of paper books – it made me feel more in my element to have that detail of the physicality books possess). After studying the image quality, it took me a few moments to realize that the only control is a forward page flip, activated by clicking on the book’s image (there are no directions or control panel, which I always find helpful when attempting a new media, as we can all agree e-books are). When the book is clicked on to advance a page, the image literally rolls over to the left (not expanding the program window, so I was still looking at a one-page spread, but one image rolled away as a book page does, a nice visual effect for those of us used to paper books) which I enjoyed and, since it is a children’s book, an effect I think children would like (like when you’re reading a book to a little kid and they seem more fascinated by the motion of the images and pages as they turn than the actual words of the book). One major problem I did have, considering the fact that it was a children’s book, is that the book’s online location was not accessible to children – the key words used to search for the book would be too complicated and the main site itself was full of text, while the search bar was relatively hard to locate. One of the glorious things about being a kid in a bookstore is the ability to look around and flip through each title to see the different pictures and characters in each book, before deciding which one you want your guardian to buy and read to you. In my opinion, an online “Kid’s Section” would be more appropriate, perhaps where previews of the children’s books are available for the kids to peruse, with downloads only accessible in the parent’s password-protected section (this seems the most logical set-up to me). This online format seems better suited to children’s learning books, which parents more often select without the children’s input. For an adult, however, it was pretty quick and easy to navigate and find a children’s book – so perhaps if parent and child work together in the selection, it does provide the quick convenience of not having to leave the computer chair to find a bedtime story.

I think I will stick to paper books, though. There’s still something about the smell of the pages and the mobility of a paperback I appreciate far more than a digital book collection (what happens if your computer crashes? You lose your whole library! And especially if the service is not free, this seems like a looming problem to me. Or what if you’re in the middle of a great read and your laptop dies?). So you can still find me curled up on the couch, not plugged into anything, immersed in the good old paper and ink.