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Thursday, December 3, 2009

Real books versus ebooks,

Posted by Melanie at 20:35 1 comments

I want something that is portable, durable, scanable, searchable ….

The Amazon Kindle is now available for sale in Canada. For the non technies among you the Kindle is an electronic device you can use to read digital books, you buy the digital books from Amazon. I have no idea if you can get them anywhere else in fact I know very little about it since I’m not interested in it.

Big bookshelf in the living room

I prefer my books to be made of paper, with pages I can turn. I like seeing them on my bookshelves and browsing through the titles on their spines. I like that books I got as a child and that I still own, bring back so many memories. I doubt you can get any of this with pixels, arranged to form words and displayed on a computer like screen.

OK, so you can adjust the text size on the Kindle to suit the degree of deterioration of your eyes. You can fill the Kindle with a stack of books and it will still weigh the same and take up the same amount of room, unlike a stack of real books.

David Pogue discusses the merits of the Kindle and other ebook readers in one of his, "collection of holiday gift guide videos," here.

But, if I could get the Canadian Oxford Dictionary in digital format. I would be first in line to get it.

The digital dictionary would anticipate the word I'm trying to spell, much like Words spell checker. It would be small and light. Much easier than my unwieldy paper version to carry around. It would be easy to look up exact definitions of words anytime, anywhere. When new words come into the language I could easily download them. The digital dictionary would be portable, updatable and smart.

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1Comments:

I also think the kindle, netbooks, etc..would be great for students. No more carrying lots of gigantic heavy hardcover books to class. It would be nice if the books would be cheaper too, but that's not likely!

By Anonymous Carolyn I.   Comments