Ebook Research

Another quiet day. We sent out our thank you notes for Christmas gifts. In the mail we got a Christmas card from Ed and Marlyn, California friends, and a photo of Romaine's son Mark's family, with his wife Tamra and their six handsome sons. We also got a book we had ordered from Amazon, Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson.

We did some more research on ebook readers and formats for the Droid. It's amazing how much is available for free. I now have Aldiko software installed and a copy of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Ken also has ereader and FBreader software. I tried reading Origin on the Droid and found that after a while my eyes were showing signs of fatigue. I have astigmatism, and it makes long term screen reading uncomfortable.

The profusion of formats and readers is confusing. It's unclear whether we would be able to read DRM protected files on the Droid if we bought them. I'd love to be able to try a variety of readers in the store. We did get a quick look at a Sony ereader once. Apparently the Kindle is available only from Amazon--so no easy way to try it out. Buying a dedicated ereader might help the eye comfort issue, since they use e-ink technology, which is supposed to be more like reading on paper. I'm thinking what makes sense is to wait a bit and see what develops.

I installed Pandora radio on my Droid today, so now I have a private radio channel labeled Mozart, how neat is that?