Books books

[schneefink]

One thing that annoys me about ebooks is that there is no cover blurb. If I don't remember what the book is about from when I got it, I'm going in blind (apart from unreliable cover illustrations.) I just got dozens of new books from this Nebula author showcase Humble Bundle and I have no idea where to even start. So I read more fic instead, also good. (Most) Fics have tags, which is helpful.

This btw also answered a question I'd started to ask myself, about how books are expensive and this month for example I'm already way past what I would have set myself as a reasonable book budget if I had such a thing. I used to illegally download books sometimes (I felt very guilty about it but I was too greedy), but I don't anymore now that I have actual income. I really should set a monthly book budget for myself. I know I'll have enough to read, it's just a matter of withstanding temptation when people rec stuff.

I'm currently trying to reduce my open browser tabs. Including this one I currently have 84 open - which is less than the 97 I had yesterday, so progress. My laptop is a bit slow sometimes and occasionally the browser crashes but overall it's still going really well, despite being 8 years old and me not looking after it well. *pets laptop*
Edit: 76 now. Small steps.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I started with the Jean Yolan book of short stories, which I'm enjoying so far.

But I hear you. I just click on something random and hope for the best, usually.

[schneefink]

Short stories might be a good place to start! I'm worried that if I choose randomly I could pick something depressing and some days I don't react well to that, but with a short story at least I'll probably have the time to read something else.

[scintilla10]

Yes! I find this quite frustrating about ebooks too, argh.

Good luck with the tab reduction progress!

[schneefink]

And I don't understand why, it wouldn't be much work to just include the blurb somewhere near the beginning. My ebook reader doesn't have a well-working tagging system, so that doesn't help either.

Thanks! It'll be a long process if I'm unlucky ;)

[strangelyjonathan]

I had never considered the missing color blurb on ebooks. I had thought about getting one of the various readers, but then decided not to. There's just something about the look and feel of a real book that I still love. The stories that I enjoy the most, those are the books I keep. The others, I trade in for new books.

[schneefink]

I do love paper books a lot, and most of my favorite books I also buy to put on my shelf. But there are several reasons why I love my ebook reader, maybe first of all that it's much easier and less heavy to carry around dozens of books, ideal for public transport rides or vacations. I also like to read long fanfics on my ebook reader; actually most of what's on there are fanfics.

[muccamukk]

And there's a lot of out of print content that the authors have reissued in e-book for cheap, which is nice. But mostly they're light and you can make the text bigger.

[schneefink]

Sometimes I remember that ebooks used to be something out of science fiction :) Yay progress.

[beatrice_otter]

I don't buy ebooks a lot, but over the years I have accumulated a LOT of free ebooks--most notably, several museums have at various times gone through their back catalogs of books relating to exhibits from years past and uploaded them as PDFs for free to anyone who wants them. Also, the University of Chicago gives away a free ebook every month.

Also, a lot of mid-90s/early-00s Baen books are available legally for free at either http://www.baen.com/categories/free-library.html or http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ and if you like MilSF there's a lot of good stuff there. (For a while, when you bought a hardcover of a Baen book, you got a CD with all of the earlier books in the series and an assortment of other Baen books that you might also like, to hopefully get new readers hooked. All of the CDs are on the web at thefifthimperium. I've linked to the main page, which has a list of each book that came with a CD in it. Click on the [BOOK] CD and you will get an html page with every book on that book's CD, which you can then select and download; click on either of the .zip files for a book and you'll get a download of the entire CD.

[schneefink]

Yay free books! Thanks for the link :)
The library here has ebooks too, but the last time I tried to borrow some the necessary software didn't work on my laptop. I should probably try again.

[beatrice_otter]

You're welcome!

[beatrice_otter]

I use Calibre to manage my ebooks on my computer and load them onto my tablet, and I use the download metadata function. Which means that when I am browsing my library on Calibre on my computer (though not on my tablet), I see both the cover art AND the book blurb for any book I click on. It's worth it to me, but it does take extra work and browsing on my laptop before going to my tablet for actual reading.

[schneefink]

That sounds like a reasonable system, but I'm much too lazy to check my laptop every time ;)

[beatrice_otter]

Actually, I just double-checked, and I was wrong! You can use calibre to get the blurbs on your tablet! Calibre itself doesn't go on a tablet, but at least for androids there's an app called "Calibre Companion" that is an easy way to move the books from your laptop to your tablet. It is not an ebook reader, but you can open the books from it and it will open them in your ebook reader of choice. Anyway, if you tap on a book in the listing, it shows you all the metadata--including the blurb, if you've taken the trouble to download the blurb in Calibre before transferring the book to your tablet.

[schneefink]

Huh, I'll have to take a look :)