I bought an e-Reader

.

Though, as I have said often on these pages, I am opposed to proprietary format books published in digital form by Amazon and other such vendors, I do believe strongly that we must take digital books seriously.  If we book-lovers do not take digital books seriously, they will be left to a generation that has only experienced books hyped on the modern Internet, and as such will be biased in favor of these large players in the media.

I received an e-mail message from Borders that they were putting on sale (that is, at a discount) an e-reader (that they have been selling for roughly $150) at the promotional price of $100 (or $99.99, to be exact).  I honestly don't know what to do about Borders: they're losing market share to Amazon and Barnes and Nobles, so that they can't really support the massive paychecks they're probably paying to their top executives.  (They're probably going to hire a new CEO at some outrageous salary, who will negotiate a merger between Borders and some other book outlet, or maybe Halliburton; who knows?)  So, while I hate Borders for putting local bookstores at a serious disadvantage in every locality, I hate a market dominated by just two players even more.

In addition, the idea of an e-reader, as I have been unsuccessfully trying to convey to you, is actually quite attractive.  The question was: could I put my own Acrobat files on the gadget, so that I could read them, say, while I was on a plane flight, or sitting in a Trailways bus that would take 6 hours to bring me 200 miles?

It turned out that the answer was: yes!

I paid my cash, and took the box home.

• You get (at least with the present deal) roughly 100 books from Borders.  Among these are: Huckleberry Finn, Dracula, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and, not least, the Kobo Reader User's Manual.
• You have scalable fonts for the books.  If you want a larger font size, it re-paginates the book for you, putting fewer words on each page.  For pdf files (Acrobat documents), you can zoom in on the page, but you have to scroll around to see the portions of text.  You can make it display the text sideways --in Landscape orientation-- which gives you about 50% bigger text, with only up-and-down scrolling, in contrast to having to scroll sideways as well.
• It's completely greyscale, but supports pictures.  The resolution is remarkably high, and the screen behaves very much like a non-back-lit LCD display, e.g. in a watch.
• The controls are (1) several buttons along the side, and a (2) little square pad that works like the arrow keys of a computer, going up, down, left or right.  The screen is not touch-sensitive, which will probably result in slightly longer screen life than if you were poking it constantly as part of the control system.

You also get an USB cord that connects the thing to your PC.  As soon as you connect them up, it installs a driver on your PC, and the Kobo shows up as a "flash drive" on your PC.  To put your own PDFs on it, just move them there (drag and drop).  Warning: if you prefer not to be zooming in on your pdf text, make sure the font is roughly 26 points, which is far, far bigger than people usually use.  With a font size that puts roughly 8-10 words per line (e.g. 26 pt) you can make it display the Whole Page, and you can read comfortably, without scrolling.  To turn the page, you just use right-arrow.

It takes a while to learn to navigate with just the Home, Back, Menu, Display, Power, and Arrow buttons.  Still, since I enjoy reading the several pieces of writing I keep as pdf files, and since I'm getting to the point where hauling a heavy laptop around is too painful and tiring, I'm happy to get away with this $100 purchase, which I can use in my own way, not to mention the books I get for free from Borders, among which I can weed through to delete useless ones.  [Disclaimer: that isn't me holding the Kobo; you can tell from the nail polish.  I use a tint closer to orange.]

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