E-books

I suppose that I should apologize for being a week behind the rest of the 23ers. I'm still moving forward and that is what counts. Our assignment for Thing 8 is to learn about downloadable audio & video available through the library system. I've decided to work with each part separately.

A few days ago I played with the E-book aspect on my home computer. I selected a book on Indian cooking: The Taste Divine. I impatiently tried to skip too far ahead and received an error message telling me to wait for the page to load before advancing. I waited a bit but nothing happened. I tried to get back into the book but it had timed out. I closed out completely and re-entered the on-line catalogue, selecting another book: Cooking the Indian Way. Once again I found that there was a real lag in the time it took to skip between pages. At one point the program must have frozen. I clicked on a link in the task pane (contents) and at least the moving circle appeared letting me know that something was happening. After waiting 4 minutes (I timed it) with nothing showing in the reading pane, I started clicking around in the left hand pane. This time the word, contents, did produce the table of contents in the reading pane. Determined not to be impatient, I plodded slowly forward but 2 pages later, I was back to the whirling blue circle and the empty reading pane. I closed out.

Despite the snail's pace of moving ahead, it was exciting to find and attempt to read a book on-line. I think I would use the service for non-fiction, or something that could be read in snippets. Trying to read through a whole novel from a desktop computer monitor would not be my cup of tea.