7. Technology I'm interested in this week

Electronic Books

I decided to try out electronic books. My public library (Woodbridge Public Library) offers this as a service through their online catalog. When I find myself getting aggravated sitting in traffic on my way to work or trying to get home, I feel like, if I could make my commute more productive, I would have less road rage. So, I decided to try audio books.

The first thing I did was to browse the listings for the author that I am currently reading, Laurell K. Hamilton. Since the Anita Blake book that I am up to in the series was not available by e-book, I chose her title “Strange Candy”.

The next step was downloading. I clicked on the link from the catalog and was prompted to enter my library card number and pin. I added the book to my cart, where I had to pick an expiration date. My choices were 7 days or 10 days. I thought that was odd since even new titles from the library are a 14 day loan. When I tried to start the download, I was informed that I did not have the required software. OverDrive Media Consule is required. The site provided a link and I downloaded it.

My next attempt to download the e-book, resulted in another message saying I did not have the required software. Now I needed i-Tunes. (my i-Tunes library is currently stored on my desktop and I was trying to download the e-book to my laptop) So, I downloaded i-Tunes from the apple website.

Finally, I was able to download the e-book files to my laptop. Now I had more choices. The user agreement states that I can listen on the computer the files were downloaded to, burn them to a CD, or import them to and ipod. It also states, that after the expiration date, that the files should be deleted or CDs be destroyed.

Since I did not have any re-writable CDs, I decided to import the files to my ipod. I connected my ipod to the laptop and selected that option. I got any error message saying the device could not be detected. Then a window appeared informing me that my ipod was synced to a different library and it could not be simultaneously synced to two libraries , therefore I needed to select the manually sync option. Once I selected the manual sync option, I was finally able to transfer the e-book to my ipod. Except now I was paranoid that syncing my ipod to my laptop would wipe out all of my music files that are currently on it. Fortunately, that did not happen.

So now I finally have the e-book on my ipod and I have been listening to it to and from work for the past couple of days. I find that I am enjoying and I do feel like I am making better use of my time while commuting. However, I think it would be better to use re-writable CDs in the future, if I plan to just listen in the car. The downside to using the ipod is that I have to use my headphones and I cant listen to my music at work because if I close out the book, it will lose my place in the story.

I found the experience of downloading the e-book very frustrating. There were no clear instructions stating what was required before you began. I realize that in the future I will not encounter these problems because now I have all the software. But, if I was not using this for my blog post, I might have given up before I made it through the process.

I think this a good technology and I like that it will enable me to read books that I might now otherwise have time for (especially now). I just think the process needs to be explained a little better so that more people might be more comfortable taking advantage of it.