I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We had a relatively quite day, and I am now watching a movie that I never really expected to watch: Saturday Night Fever. God help me.
After receiving my Sony Reader (PRS-600) for Christmas last year I realized that I needed a way to purchase new books and manage my ebook collection. The Sony Reader comes with the Sony Reader Library software which connects to their eBookstore and has an iTunes like interface. The Sony Reader Library software is designed to run on Windows and Mac OS X, not Linux. I unsuccessfully tried to install it on Linux using both WINE and Codeweavers. The appeal of the software was too little to entice me to keep a copy of Windows running. Luckily, there is a program called Calibre that is available and works well.
Calibre is an open-source program that is freely available for managing eBook collections and may be run on Windows, Mac OS X, as well as Linux. The project was started when Kovid Goyal purchased the original Sony Reader (the PRS-505) and discovered that there were no programs available on Linux to manage the Sony Reader. Over the last four years, Calibre has grown and now supports not only the Sony Reader line, but also the Nook and the Kindle, and a slew of others. When I connect my Sony Reader, Calibre instantly recognizes it and mounts it, and I can begin managing what books are loaded onto my Sony Reader. Calibre is also able to convert a large number of file formats making it simple to load just about any document onto the Reader.
With Calibre to manage my collection, my focus has turned to gathering materials to read. There is a humongous select of eBooks available for free under public domain and can be downloaded from sites like FeedBooks.com, ManyBooks.net, and Google Books. Using just these sources, I have managed to grow my eBook Library to several hundred books.
Over the past year, the eBook market has really started to grow. Barnes & Noble came out with the Nook, Borders Books & More opened their ebook store and teamed up with Kobo Books to sell the Kobo Reader, and the general awareness has been raised. When Borders announced that they were opening an ebook store in the summer, I got very excited. I was disappointed, when it finally arrived, to discover that they also use software that is Windows and Mac OS X only. However, they do not use DRM, which enables me to move books into Calibre once I have purchased them, unlike Amazon.
This weekend, Wife and I took the kids to see a show at the Hole in the Wall Theater in New Britain. The show was called “Christmas Live Old Time Radio” and was a wonderful recreation of an old 1940’s era radio show. You can see a short clip of a rehearsal on their website, and on Youtube. Being a fan of Old Time Radio I was eager to see the performance and walked out impressed and pleased.
When the kids were younger, I had a subscription to XM Radio and would listen to the OTR station while driving. I wouldn’t say that the kids loved it, but they never really complained either. We also use to go to the Prairie Home Companion show each year on the 4th of July, which follows an OTR type of format. So, I was hoping that the kids would enjoy the show, and was happy to find that they did enjoy themselves.
The show was started with a short introduction and then segued with a ‘Radio Announcer’ who would announce the station identification, the time, and tell us what was coming up next. There were appearances by a cavalcade of big names from the 1940’s, including Jack Benny, Orson Wells, Dennis Day, George Burns & Gracie Allen, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and Groucho and Harpo Marx. They performed a retelling of “A Christmas Carol” by Dickens, and an episode of “The Great Gildersleeve”. Marlene Deitrich, Katherine Hepburn, and the Andrews Sisters appeared to perform a few musical numbers.
A nice touch to the entire production was how the cast maintained the atmosphere during the show when not performing. A small section of the stage off to one side was decked out like a living room, with a table, chairs and couch. Cast members not participating in a skit would sit and ‘relax’ by playing cards, having a drink of coffee, or dancing to the background music. Combined with the sound effects table on the other side of the stage it was quite the experience.
I highly recommend the show for anyone in the area during the next few weeks. Check out their site, tickets are donation only. And the theater only seats around 100 people so it will be an intimate experience.
This entry was originally written in May 2010, but never published. Finally published after minor tweaks, November 2010.
For this past Christmas I got the Sony eReader – Touch Edition, and I absolutely love it. It is probably the best electronic gizmo I have ever gotten.
For those that don’t know, the Sony Reader – Touch is an electronic book reader, that can be used for reading ebooks in several formats, can view jpeg images, allows for hand-written notes, and can play mp3 music files. After watching the ebook reader market for the past couple of years, I ultimately choose the Sony Reader over the Amazon Kindle for a couple of reasons.
Primarily, I choose the Sony because it can handle so many ebook formats: epub, pdf, lrf, bbeb, as well as simple txt and rtf. The Kindle only handles (thier proprietary format) azw, as well as mobi, txt, and tpz. The Kindle does not support pdf, which really restricts the ability to read non-ebook files.
The second reason is the fact that the Sony Reader’s memory can be expanded with Sony Memory Stick or Secure Digital memory cards. This expandability provides enough space for as many books as I can afford to buy, and to have a healthy selection of music and pictures as well. While the first Kindle had SD storage expansion, I waited too long and they came out with the Kindle 2, which did not have the SD expansion.
The third reason is the touch screen. When reading an ebook, I can flick my thumb accross the screen to turn the page. It closely mimics the process of turning the page of a paper book. The Kindle has simple buttons along the side. My fear with the buttons on the Kindle is that I may depress them while trying to hold the unit while reading. Never happens with my Sony!
Finally, the pure aesthetics had a large impact. The original Kindle was very angular and blocky in appearance and had a large area committed to the keyboard. The Sony was sleek and mature in appearance, and very little of the ‘real estate’ was committed to anything other than the screen. Basically, the Kindle looked like a joke.
Trouble on the course
Had a good time with the boys at the golf course and landed in the dog house.
