books – OZTHOUGHTS

How to Read a Book – Is This the Future? Funny Video

So, how do you read a “real” paper book? I know, we can all do that, but will we still know how to in, say 50 years time? We have all seen those videos of small children trying to swipe to the next page in their kiddies books, as they have been brought up on iPads and similar devices and found those videos to be charming and funny in a nice and fuzzy way. But in fact they are showing us the future of reading. Like it or loathe it, ebooks are where we are heading, and patently paper books are slowly but steadily being superseded by their digital descendents.

And it is possible that in the not too distant future, paper books will only be read by academics in pursuit of their knowledge of these primitive predigital eras. Depressing thought isn’t it?

In spite of the fact that I own a blog that is devoted to all aspects of ebooks, I am also a passionate lover of the paper variety as well, and have thousands of them which I read and reread with enormous pleasure. Loving the feel, the smell and the weight of a real book – And those rows of book spines on my bookshelves, all of which promise me so much pleasure and escape to new and different worlds. Whilst I am very fond of my Sony, Kindle and so on, and truly appreciate their convenience, a couple of lonely looking, albeit sleek and smooth ereaders on a book shelf, each containing an enormous number of ebooks are in no way to be equated with the pleasure of the real thing obviously. A total lack of the sense of adventure that a decently filled book shelf offers us.

Paper books sitting there on the shelf offer us in a highly visible manner an escape from the daily grind, romance, friendship, relaxation and all the many benefits of reading, and they do this in a tangible and individual manner. ereaders obviously offer the same experiences, but they are discrete, nothing to be seen, no visible promise of pleasures, actually really very sterile objects.

Gooseberry Patch – Cheap But Good Cookery Ebooks

Own an ereader and want recipes? Well here you go, The Gooseberry Patch has them!

The hugely successful Gooseberry Patch series of cook books are available now as ebooks. There are a couple of hundred of them covering just about every aspect of cooking delicious meals for yourself and your family.

These ebooks are as is normal with cookery books, set out subject by subject, so there are a whole range that show you how to cook meat in all manner of ways, how to make puddings and so on, from basic to really quite advanced recipes.

Titles range from “25 Savoury Pie Recipes”, “Christmas Classics Cookbook”, “25 Meat Loaf Recipes”, a whole slew of ebooks with the series name “Circle of Friends” – which are recipes that the two good ladies who started this company have been given by their friends to share with readers.

The Gooseberry Patch has been around now for quite some time, being founded in 1984 by Vickie Hutchins and Jo Ann Martin, who describe themselves as follows:

Continue reading “Gooseberry Patch – Cheap But Good Cookery Ebooks”

What You Need To Consider When Buying An Ereader

Ereader or Tablet? Which should you buy? A bit of help for you here…

It can be very confusing when you think you might like to leap into the world of ereading and ebooks. There are so many different models out there, and the considerable problem of the various ebook formats as well.

ereaders

To help you a bit in making a choice I shall discuss some of the main considerations you should take into account before parting with your hard earned money and committing yourself to one or other model of ereader.

Does colour matter to you?

The first thing to consider is do you want to read novels rather than ebooks with loads of illustrations or magazines or comics? If the answer to that question is comics, magazines and other reading matter with lots of colour and illustrations, then you need to consider a tablet rather than a dedicated ereader, as most real ereaders are monochrome, and not really very good to view images with.

There are a number of ereaders with LCD screens which can manage colour OK, but their screens tend to be too small to be really pleasurable to view images with. But with things such as the iPad and similar tablets, comics, magazines newspapers and coffee table ebooks and similar are a real pleasure to read and gaze upon, given the brilliant colours they can offer you.

If on the other hand you want to read ebooks that are basically text – novels and similar, then probably a real, dedicated monochrome ereader is what you want, as they are specifically designed for this form of reading, and are totally optimised for such ebooks.

So that is your first decision. Colour and images = tablet. Text and almost no images = dedicated monochrome ereader.

Screen size.

This is perhaps the next consideration. If you are suffering from any sort of eye troubles, then the larger the screen you can get is something you should think about. Since if you have a smallish screen, and need the text size to be large, obviously you can then only fit so many words onto the screen at a time, so with a small screen you will be turning pages like a mad thing, but with a larger screen you will be able to have the letters quite large, but still have a reasonable number of words per page.

Currently the only large screen dedicated ereader I am aware of is the Kindle DX, which has a screen that is 9.7 inches diagonally across, room enough to make the letters huge and still have lots of words on the screen, otherwise you should consider a tablet again.

Most dedicated ereaders these days have a screen that is about 6 or 7 inches diagonally, which if your eyes are OK, is much like reading an average paper back.

So, if your eyes are OK, then any dedicated ereader will work for you , if not, consider a tablet with a much larger screen whatever sort of ebooks you want to read on it.

Front light or clip on reading light.

Continue reading “What You Need To Consider When Buying An Ereader”

Ebook Review. Morlac, The Ultimate Fantasy Story

With Morlac – The Quest of the Green Magician, Alan Ruse has written what has to be the ultimate epic Fantasy saga. He manages to incorporate every form of fantasy with the possible exception of Vampires into the three stories that make up this ebook.

In fact he first published this book in 1986 as a paper book, but it has now been published as an ebook.

From This…………

To This……….. Read on, All will be Explained……

In passing I have to say I really like this cover, it splendidly sets the tone of the book, shows that Conan is lurking somewhere in the back of Ruse’s mind, and reminds me of the Sci-Fi mags I used to buy many, many years ago.

Continue reading “Ebook Review. Morlac, The Ultimate Fantasy Story”

Macular Degeneration and Ereaders

For those elderly folk who suffer from one form of macular degeneration or another, it seems that ereaders offer an ideal solution to their problems with reading.

Macular degeneration is defined as follows:-

Macular degeneration is a silent and painless loss of central vision due to the degeneration or dying of cells in the retina, called the macula.

What is lost is the central portion of your sight – what you see right in front of you like the face of a person or the words in a book.

Obviously this will give tremendous problems when trying to read, as we use the centre of our field of vision to see the letters on the page – try to read a book only looking at the page from the edge of your field of vision – sort of looking off to the left or right and see how easy it is to read the page whilst not actually looking at it properly and you will see what I mean.

In fact there are a whole load of different versions of this particular eye problem, but they all entail the loss of centre field vision to one degree or another, and all, obviously effect how easy and pleasurable it is to read a book.

And this is where ereaders come into their own as opposed to regular printed paper books, which unless you buy yourself large print versions of whatever book you wish to read, the letters (fonts) are way too small for someone with this particular eye problem to see to any degree.

Added to which is the sad fact that not all books are published in a large font version, and generally they also cost more than their standard versions as well. So paper books are really not much use to those suffering from this particular form of eye problem – which is a quite large proportion of people over 65 years of age, sadly. Continue reading “Macular Degeneration and Ereaders”

Major US Publishers Call For End Of US Book Embargo To Cuba

About 40 of the USA’s major publishers have joined with Smashwords founder Mark Coker and Publisher’s Weekly and have set up a petition on the White House’s website demanding that the embargo on books and educational materials being exchanged between Cuba and the USA be ended at once.

This embargo, which is part of the more general embargo that the USA imposed on Cuba about 50 years ago is still in force, in spite of the easing of relations between the two countries of late, and is obviously wrong and in dire need of being rescinded at once.

This idea was first mooted at a recent visit by a contingent of major players in the USA publishing industry during an international book fair in Havana, where these visiting Americans took part in a number of panel discussions, where the idea of free exchange of ideas, literature and books was discussed.

havana.books — **Happy Young Readers At The Havana International Book Fair**

Continue reading “Major US Publishers Call For End Of US Book Embargo To Cuba”