My name is Gerry, I am a book-a-holic

On the long train journey back to Siracusa from Palermo on Saturday, my VP Finance for the first time used one of the two e-book readers I brought to Italy. (An e-book reader is a book-size electronic device that displays text in very high resolution. See earlier post.)

The next day, after she finished the book – a mystery I had bought at Christmas and loaded on the Bookeen Cybook Gen3 for her – I asked about the experience. “I don’t know what I can tell you,” she said. “I read a book. It wasn’t irritating.”

That may sound like damning with faint praise but is actually high praise. She had long resisted the notion of e-books. When I first started reading on a first-generation Toshiba Pocket PC six years ago, she tried it briefly and turned up her nose – you had to push the page-turn button every few seconds because the PDA screen could display such a small amount of text.

But the new e-book readers like the Sony (see pic) and Bookeen models I brought to test solve the problems she saw with reading on a PDA - they’re easier on the eyes and you don’t have to turn the page as often.

An e-book reader can be a godsend to book-a-holics like us when travelling (or at least away from home) for a long period. You can’t bring too many paper books with you on a plane or you’ll end up going overweight on your baggage and paying through the nose – especially now with reduced baggage allowances. That said, we brought 15 or so between us. We could order from Amazon or Chapters (Canadian) and have them delivered to Italy, but shipping overseas would drive up the price.

You can buy English-language books here in Siracusa. I picked up a rather worn copy of Umberto Eco’s Baudolino in English translation for €1.50 at a place that was selling second-hand books to raise money for charity. But selection is poor and prices for new books generally high. We saw one travel book in a local shop priced at almost double what we paid on Amazon before leaving.

E-books from sites such as eBooks.com and Books on Board typically cost less than the paper version – I paid $7.95 (U.S.) for the mystery novel – and you can fit hundreds on a reader. But while selection is growing all the time, you can’t get everything published. You can’t borrow e-books from an e-library either, and you can only share the ones you buy with up to two other devices.

One solution: download the text of books that are out of copyright from sites such as The Online Books Page, format them for the reader using free software such as Mobipocket Creator and upload them to the device. Free books. In a future post, I’ll describe the fairly simple e-book creation process.