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Category Archives: ereading

Long-overdue ebook availability update

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

It has been a while since I’ve looked at the total number of ebooks and audiobooks available in our library’s OverDrive system. Over a year, in fact! The figures are encouraging, though:

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
December 2010 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
February 2011 4,534 1,089 3,297 505 9,425
August 2011 5,197 1,139 5,773 880 12,989
January 2012 6,271 1,208 11,560 1,543 20,582
April 2013 6,999 1,516 20,281 3,410 32,206

The growth is clearly in the ebooks, rather than audio books, which is unsurprising, as audiobooks are generally a lot more expensive.

I’m still very much a hybrid reader but do prefer to read books as ebooks if I have the option. When I read physical books I miss the option of tapping on a word to find out its meaning or of increasing the size of the text when I’m reading in low light levels or when my eyes are tired.

I recently re-read my own two books and found a few editing errors in both. Those have now been fixed. I’m working on a third Hawley Lodge book (with more of an historical angle to it) – but progress is slow due to a lot of other commitments at the moment. Watch this space!

Finding my next read…

22 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries

≈ Leave a comment

…is so much harder than it needs to be. I like the book recommendations from sites   like Goodreads and often use them to go hunting for a library book. Because the two libraries of which I’m a member also have access to ebooks, the first place I look is the online catalogue of the Ontario Library Service. But the book I’d like to read is only available to borrow as an ebook about one time out of ten, so then I have to go to the online library catalogue of Library 2 (the more convenient to visit of the two libraries) to see if they’ve got it, leaving Library 1’s online catalogue as the final resort if I can’t find it anywhere else.

It’s a time-consuming process and often a frustrating one. I don’t know what it is about the library catalogue software used in these small local libraries, but it is fairly clunky and hard to navigate. What I would really love would be to be able to register my membership of these libraries with my Goodreads account somehow and then have information about the holdings of the libraries (digital and physical) appear in the Goodreads website instead of having to schlep off and do all my searching on the three different, difficult, other sites.

Finding a book could be a lot simpler, I’m sure…

Grab it while you can!

04 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Marketing, Websites

≈ Leave a comment

It’s Read an Ebook Week over at Smashwords from 4-10 March. Many books have been reduced in price as part of this promotion, including The Viking and the Vendetta, which is half price for the week, using the coupon REW50 at checkout.

Ebook availability (and classification)

06 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries

≈ 1 Comment

Time for one of my periodic spins around the virtual bookshelves of the Ontario public library system to report on the state of our ebook collection. Here’s a table showing the growth in availability of ebooks since December last year.

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
December 2010 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
February 2011 4,534 1,089 3,297 505 9,425
August 2011 5,197 1,139 5,773 880 12,989

 
It’s pretty impressive, with the number of books almost doubling in that time period. Also interesting is that the number of fiction ebooks has now surpassed the number of fiction audio books. One thing I’ve noticed about my own use of ebooks is that I’m more likely to pick up non-fiction titles as ebooks than I would in the physical library. I don’t think I’ve ever browsed the non-fiction shelves in the smaller library that I use on a regular basis, and in the larger one I’ve only ever looked at one or two sections. In the virtual library I fall across books that sound interesting more often, even if sometimes the classification seems a bit odd (Zombies: A Hunter’s Guide seems an unlikely candidate for the section on ‘History’, for example, while Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is classified as ‘Non-Fiction’. Or perhaps I’ve become a bit out of touch with the world and it’s my perception that’s the problem. Maybe zombies and sea monsters really are roaming the earth and oceans…).

Audio books: pros and cons

20 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Free reads, Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

I mentioned in my last post on statistics that I had been listening to a few audio books from the library, despite having thought previously that I wouldn’t be making much use of that particular variety of ebook. My thinking had been that audio books are fine for long car journeys, but that they didn’t really fit into my current lifestyle very well, since long car journeys don’t feature in it much.

Well I have to eat my words on that, as we have listened to four audio books since my original scepticism. One was so-so, the other three very good. As I mentioned before, the experience of listening rather than reading a book is different in important respects. For one thing, it takes a lot longer to listen to a book than it does to read one (part of my original prejudice against them, I admit). There’s also the problem of the narrator actually intruding on the book. The second book I heard was The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde. It was very well done and I enjoyed the narration. The two books after that were the next in the series, Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots. In these, the narration was generally good, but there were some things that jarred with me. For one thing, the books are written from a first-person viewpoint, and Thursday Next, the protagonist, comes from the town of Swindon, Wiltshire. So the Lancashire accent of the narrator seemed…odd.

The second narrator also pronounced some things differently from the earlier one, so that ‘Spec Ops’, the abbreviated name for ‘Special Operations’ was pronounced ‘Spesh Ops’ by the first one and ‘Speck Ops’ by the second. Now I know this marks me out as a complete pedant, but the lack of consistency bothered me (couldn’t they just have asked Jasper Fforde which one he preferred?). The occasional mispronunciation of words can also be annoying. Of course it’s perfectly possible that I’ve been pronouncing those words wrongly all these years – but in a text-based book, it’s not something that I have to worry about. The prosody (the stress on words) was sometimes off, too. On a few occasions I found myself thinking that the author probably didn’t mean the sentence to be read with the emphasis on that word. Distracting…

There’s a social aspect to an audio book that’s very different from a text book. I really enjoyed the way that my husband and I were laughing at the jokes in the Thursday Next books as we heard them. It was a shared experience in a way that ‘regular’ reading can’t be (unless you’re a member of a book club, I suppose, but even then, you’re not experiencing the words at the same time as each other). The two later books in the Thursday Next series were only available as printed books from the library. We’ve both read and enjoyed them, but not at the same time. And there’s that element of book-jealousy, too, as one of us had to read them before the other. This only happens occasionally, but the problem reached a peak with one of the Harry Potter books, Order of the Phoenix, I think, where we were reading it in shifts. Audio books avoid that problem neatly.

The other problem with audio books is that it is easier to lose concentration than it is with a printed book. Some interruption can easily distract the listener and, before you know it, you’ve missed a key part of the plot. Price is also something that concerns me about audio books. Since mine have all come from the library service, this isn’t something I can honestly complain about, but the audio book version of The Eyre Affair is $31.93 at audible.com, whereas the ebook is $10.99. That seems like an enormous disparity: quite hard to justify, I’d say. Is this a tax on laziness?

More stats

25 Friday Feb 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Libraries, Websites

≈ 1 Comment

I’ve been diligently adding the books I’ve read since I’ve been living in Canada to LibraryThing and (more recently) Goodreads. I should probably just plump for one or the other, but each has features that the other lacks. I find LibraryThing more intuitive to navigate and Goodreads has some cool elements such as the ability to display statistics on your reading habits.

My Goodreads stats for 2010 and 2011 tell an interesting story. I’ve read the same number of books in two months of this year as I read in the whole of 2010. A large percentage of them have been ebooks, read on the ereader I got for Christmas, although there are a fair few library books in there, too. With the exception of the two Percy Jackson books, which I bought as a gift for my daughter, I haven’t paid for any of them: I’ve either downloaded them from free ebook sites, used coupons from Smashwords authors or borrowed the books in audio or ebook form from the public library’s OverDrive site. I was dismissive of audio books in an earlier post, but I’ve listened to three since then, mainly because they weren’t available in any other format through OverDrive. Listening to an audio book has turned out to be a pleasant way of making a usually private activity into a more social one: my husband and I are enjoying listening to a book together in the evenings.

More books have become available through OverDrive since I first posted about it at the end of December. The figures are now:

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
December 2010 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
February 2011 4,534 1,089 3,297 505 9,425

An increase in availability of all content of 143%, then, and a particularly big rise for the ebooks, with a 278% rise in available fiction titles. No wonder I’m reading so much…

E-editing

30 Sunday Jan 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Editing, ereading, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

E-editing

I’m enjoying my ereader very much – it’s such a comfortable and easy way to read. One way I’m using it which I hadn’t anticipated is as an editing device. I’m slowly working on The Viking and the Vendetta, when I have time. I’ve written about half the book, so far. The other week, I converted the Word file into epub format and started to read the work-in-progress on my ereader. I soon found that it was much more pleasurable than trying to read the book on a computer screen (as is the case with every other ebook, so of course it was!).

The ability to make notes on the ereader makes it even more useful. When I notice something that needs changing, I can insert a note and then, when I’m back at the computer, I can go through the file, note by note, and make the alterations to the master Word document. The limitations of the stylus and on-screen keyboard mean that I won’t be making major additions to the book using this method, but it is great as a line-editing device.

It’s interesting that having an ereader is changing the way I write as well as the way I read!

Ebook quality

28 Friday Jan 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Editing, epublishing, ereading, Free reads, Libraries

≈ Leave a comment

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

She was watching them and biting her Up.

…from the sideboard as! I held their attention…

Ill work on Terence and make another stab at the diary.

“J think he lost the battle because of his hemorrhoids.”

Kõiõing-neeaies as sne spoêe.

Authors of self-published books are often criticised for poor editing. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to edit one’s own writing – this is one area where a book that goes through the traditional publication process is almost always going to have an advantage. Almost always…

The examples above are not from a self-published book. They’re from the first ebook I borrowed from my public library (via the OverDrive service I discussed the other week). In theory, from a book which has undergone a rigorous quality-control procedure. Oh yeah?

They’re clearly errors which have crept in through an OCR (optical character recognition) process. Which has been poorly checked. Now I haven’t paid anything for this book, having read it through the library service, but if this is the same file that is made available for purchase, then I would have paid between $6.07 and $7.99 for it. And would have been even more annoyed by the mistakes. It’s not just self-published books which need careful proof-reading.

The book is an excellent read, by the way, despite the distracting errors.

Book review: Smallworld by Dominic Green

04 Tuesday Jan 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in 'Show me the free' challenge, ereading, Free reads, Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

My first free read of 2011 was Smallworld by Dominic Green, available free from Smashwords. Sci-fi is a little outside my comfort zone, and there were so many strange words in the first few pages that I began to wonder if I’d be able to continue reading. But I persevered, and I’m glad I did. The story concerns a tiny moonlet which is home to the Reborn-in-Jesus family, their various adopted children, a mysterious hermit and a Devil. The Devil has a habit of killing anyone who threatens the peace of the colony. The reason the Reborn-in-Jesuses have so many adopted children is because their parents were all killed by the Devil.

The novel has some great side-swipes at issues of genetic engineering (the McChickens), religious indoctrination, slavish exploitation of technology and the abuse of power in general. There are some laugh-out-loud moments: I liked this description of the state schools on other worlds, for example:

“Those schools incorporate electric shock discipline, chemical aversion therapy, and subliminal messaging.”
“Granted,” nodded the Pastor, “but it is not all good.”

There were a few minor typos and, in some places, I felt there was a paucity of commas. But nothing major. I will admit that the ending left me feeling slightly puzzled, but maybe I hadn’t been paying close enough attention.

I’ve come to the conclusion (after a whole week and a half of ereading) that there are two types of ebooks: those where you keep checking the page number you’re up to (and how much further there is to go), and those where you don’t care what page number you’re on, because you’re enjoying the book. Rather like being on a long car journey – if it’s a tedious one, you keep looking at the road signs to see how many miles/kilometres you’ve got until your destination. If the scenery is beautiful, you’re not so worried. At the beginning of this book, I was checking the page numbers, but by half-way through, I was enjoying the ride. Thanks, Dominic!

‘Show Me the Free’ reading challenge

01 Saturday Jan 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading

≈ 1 Comment

For someone who’s reluctant to pay for ebooks, the reading challenge announced last month over at The Unread Reader blog was pretty irresistible. Read and review twelve free ebooks in a year? I can do that! Count me in…

← Older posts

Free ebook

The Roman and the Runaway

Ebook: $2.99

The Viking and the Vendetta

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