Waiting in the Garden for the Device to Land…..

Beginning a new blog about your experiences with an e-reader you don’t yet have in hand (supposedly it’s in the mail) at quarter past ten when you ought to be finishing your Monday preparations is an inauspicious beginning. 

The reason I saw fit to begin this blog tonight is that I wanted to set to virtual paper my initial reaction at looking into the GoogleBook endeavor for the very first time.  I’ve looked at Project Gutenberg in the past, and am quite familiar with the free public domain editions of classics now floating in mass quantities in the aether of the net, but I still was not prepared for GoogleBook.  I expected to see a rather rickety, half-tended garden patch of blue title links, all to the undesirables of the e-book world.  Instead, rows upon rows of categories line my screen.  Book covers bloom in glorious technicolor!  As I read through the categories, I was more and more impressed with the work Google has done to get multiple publishers to offer full text books and limited samples online through this service. 

I had been vascillating between Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Amazon’s Kindle (Apple’s iPad was out of the question due to cost – student budget still as I write my dissertation), but when the screen bloomed with this large selection of free online books and book previews, I knew that buggy software and slow page-turns or not, I made a world-broadening choice in selecting the e-reader that lets me download in the ePub format.  I’m feeling pretty thrilled with my decision at this moment, waiting for my birthday present to arrive in the mail, waiting to begin studying how an early iteration of the e-reader impacts the way I read.  I hope a few of you will come along for this study and test-drive of an e-reader!