Catch That Gibbon

What a great thing these electronic books are. This is my Kindle experience.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Kindle
• Gibbon
• Decline
• Roman
• Empire
• Hitch
• 22
• American
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• Motley
• Rise
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• Hume
• Addison

[shumble32]

Kindle non-feature list includes: 1. can't read in the bath 2. can't lend to friends 3. can't tear out pages to put as message in a bottle when marooned on a desert island 4. can't use as a fire lighter in a similar survival situations 5. can't use as toilet paper 6. can't be recycled 7. can't work without batteries 8. not guaranteed to work after a few years 9. can't replace all the books on your shelves as many are not available in e-book format 10.... many more (but ran out of space)

[tenneral]

@shumble32 Well of course that's all very well, but a Kindle doesn't weigh much, it won't fall apart after opening & closing several times, you can't lend to friends and never hope to get it back, it doesn't gather dust, you can get rid of a book on Kindle without thinking you have committed vandalism, you can find any word in a book in a flash even without an index, lots of the biggest fattest books are free. I could go on but you get the point, I'm sure. Now I've run out of space!!

[fluffymcdeath]

Ah. That Gibbon. Not the Funky one.

[tenneral]

@fluffymcdeath Ah, the Goodies. Those were the days [when they all had hair and Bill Oddie was not quite so irritating!]

[RustyTube]

I prefer my books typeset, printed and bound. It is much healthier to look at the light reflected from the paper than the light emitted by an electronic device (especially considering how much time I already spend at the computer).

Not to mention I can flip through the pages if I feel like it. Also referring to illustrations not on the same page is much simpler in a real book.

Best of all, paper books need no batteries!

[tenneral]

@RustyTube I would certainly have agreed with you until I actually saw one of these Kindles. However, unlike a computer screen, they do not emit any light so you cannot read them in a darkened room: the effect is very similar to reading a cleanly printed page - and you get to choose your preferred font-size too. My Kindle works for about a month before it needs recharging.

[TheWisemonkey8]

I could listen to this man for hours... yes... I would love a kindle reader... I downloaded a wonderful torrent of over 6000 philosophical texts a few years ago. Sadly, peering at the notebook screen while reading tends to induce headache.

Yes, I recent acquired a nice hard-backed bound set of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I hear it is perhaps still the most authoritative cometary on the subject.

I must admit... I kind of like the feel and smell of a 3D book...

[bajorjor1]

No wonder you are so articulate

[kurtilein3]

@8journey8

the craziest thing about that data center: they even seem to put the value of their data a bit higher than the value of human life. If a fire breaks out, you have 90 seconds to evacuate the whole building before it gets completely flooded with 400000 dollars worth of Argon, and anyone still in there suffocates just like the fire. This cannot be prevented once the system is activated, there only are a few emergency-buttons that grant you a delay of 1 minute maximum.

[kurtilein3]

@8journey8

one time i got a tour of a facility where they have some supercomputers and data archives. Security was about as strict as in a nuclear reactor, the building had double walls, anti-terrorism protection, an automatic fire extinguishing system, and was shielded off against all electromagnetic radiation. Just an insane amount of security. And one thing they have on their highest-security data storage are all the scanned books from Project Guttenberg :)

[fidgaf]

I went nuts on Ancient Greek and Roman authors. Most were free.