Confessions of a self-professed gadget girl

I’ve done my own informal investigation of the e-book market over the past few months ever since I bought my iPad last year and prior to enrolling in the MET program. I actually bought the iPad so that I could take all of my MET PDFs and scanned portions of hard copy texts to do some pre-reading on my summer vacation in Europe without having to travel with the added bulk and potential mess of loose papers.

I have now tried a lot of the software for the competing e-readers including Kindle, Kobo, and iBooks because I was finding that all books aren’t available for all readers and not all e-reading software is created equal.

Peter Popup

Alice Lite

I have also taken some time to test out books that were marketed as taking advantage of the iPad’s cool interface technology. I tried Alice Lite which has the ability to interact with the pictures in interesting ways but unfortunately did not take advantage of the natural page flipping function and insted uses arrows. I also purchased PopOut! The Tale of Peter Rabbit, you can see a YouTube clip of the interactivity here.  It has background music and the option to read the story to you or you can read it yourself and select a word and it will sound it out. I thought this might be good for teaching children to read.

I also checked out Oz Manga and DC Comics to get a sense for how these genres would be presented electronically. One of the comics I chose had the option for a guided view which would zoom into the panels that I quite liked. Funny enough I think I like traditional books best in electronic format. I just find it more convenient and easier to read on an iPad than traditional format.

Lady Susan

Swim the Fly

 

The book I’m reading now is Lady Susan by Jane Austen which was free from Project Gutenburg which I wouldn’t have read otherwise.

Prior to that I read Swim the Fly at the recommendation of my teenage nephews. Apparently this is recommended reading for all childless Aunties of teenage boys. I think the only reason I actually read this one was that it was easy to get and under $2. I loved it because it exposed me to a book that I never would have otherwise read and I really doubt I would have bothered ordering it in hard copy especially if it was more expensive.

At the end of the day I think that the IPad has created more opportunities for me to read. Access to books is quick, cheap, and easy and offers seemingly endless reading choices.

Posted in: Uncategorized, Week 06: eBooks