It’s beginning to look more like a book. The MS of Gypsy Scholar, which Jinks and I have sweated over for two years, now resides on my swanky new Sony Portable Reader System alongside War and Peace, The Heart of Darkness and 98 other titles which came as freebies.As explained, the aim is to read the MS as if I were a reader instead of an editor. I did the transfer yesterday and was ready to go but swimming pool water got into my goggles and left my eyes streaming. Some time this weekend, then.
How good is the machine? For me, optically as good as paper but it supplements rather than replaces books. Electronic things break and if you were in Timbuktu (excellent BBC4 programme last night about the ancient documents found there) you’d need print back-up. But ponder this. Suppose you were going foreign and needed your big 2½ kg dictionary. If it came as an ebook you could load it into the 255 gm Sony and still have room for Hamlet, The Rights of Man, Middlemarch, On the Origin of Species, Jungle Book, the complete Jane Austen, most of Dickens and le tout Ruth Rendell. In all 160 titles.
At the moment I’m spouting the press release; I need to use the thing. I checked title availability by Googling “ebooks” and turned up half a dozen, mainly university, sources. Project Gutenberg offers 27,000 free out-of-copyright titles. Copyrighted titles you pay for. If you want French books try Athena. On verra.
Latest: Just copied and transferred Rousseau's La nouvelle Héloise (via the Athena site) with no problems. Wonder what it's about.
