Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
General Subjects => General Forum => Topic started by: mark smyth on December 16, 2010, 05:18:51 PM
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Has anyone bought an e-book reader? How easy is it to get plant books etc?
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What price a "first edition" e-book???????
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Priceless. :D
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I know several people with e-books, which I have tried and to be honest paper is best. I think you can just use a computer instead if you really want it on a screen. Mind you having past forty I am considered old fashioned!
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I use Amazon's Kindle on my Ipad. I love it
Unlikely to be plant books in e-book format
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THanks for the replies. A gardening friend was going to ask her kids to get her one for Christmas
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I've seen people engrossed in what I assume to be e-books on their blackberry type phone thingies ( can you tell I know a lot about this stuff?) on the bus..... easy enough to carry dread something 'palm-sized' while on a bus or train but less easy to do that with even a small laptop.....
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Amazon's TV advert says how clever, you can read kindle books on different phones, I see a bubble "you can convert them to PDF and share with your friends".
Google often tells me where I can download pirated copies of books, even expensive gardening books.
I think we're about to see what the world after paper is like.
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I am not sure that it is a world after paper yet, but certainly a viable alternative. I still prefer to read the SRGC Bulletin on paper rather than the pdf version, although I am happy to read the earlier AGS mags on screen, then print off the relevant articles I want to take on holiday with me.
I often use a laptop with Adobe Acrobat Reader to view scanned pdf files of books. If you turn the image 90 degrees anticlockwise and change the view to one page only, you can hold your laptop like a book. It props up easily on your knee, and the PageUp and PageDown keys fall easily under the fingers. Not quite as neat as a new-fangled iPad, but cheaper ! I even prop it up on the pillow and read in bed to the considerable exasperation of my wife.....
As for books, you don't need to pirate them. As well as Google Books theer are several other Digital Libraries on the web which have free scanned original books. So far I have only used the old out-of-print books which are out of copyright, and you would have to travel a long way to find - then only in a reference library. I have also found several Botanic Gardens with original scanned herbariam sheets.
Out of interest Librivox at http://librivox.org/newcatalog/ (http://librivox.org/newcatalog/) has a good free (Public Domain) catalogue of audio books which I download to a USB stick as mp3 files and listen to on an iPlayer or simply plug into the stick into my car audio system to listen on my way to and from work.