Whilst on the subject of books!

ereaders!

I haven't used my Sony ereader quite as much as I thought I would. Then again, I thought it would come into its own on holidays and we've not really had a holiday since I got it at Christmas.

Over the Christmas break I downloaded a load of copyright free books, mainly classics like Oscar Wilde etc. A couple of weeks ago though I made my first proper purchase. I deliberated between buying the physcial book, or downloading it, because it's the latest work by my favourite author Barbara Kingsolver (The Lacuna). I eventually decided that I might as well go for the e version and see how I got on.

First surprise was the price of the thing. I can only assume that because it's not yet available in paperback, the sellers (Waterstones in this instance) thought it ok to price it higher than the paperback will be. How on earth can that be? I can't for the life of me fathom why an e book should be more expensive than a paperback. I know it's still relatively new technology but surely the overheads must be less than those of physically printing, packaging and posting a book out.

My first attempt at paying for and downloading the book failed. At the payment stage. Error with the website. My second and third attempts were the same. I emailed Waterstones. They replied 5 days later saying that they were having problems processing ebooks and to try again in a couple of weeks.

I left it a month. Everything went through all ticky boo.

Until I tried to download the file which saved as an jpg of the title and nothing else. I then took the unusual step (for me) of consulting the instructions. As far as I could see I was doing everything right. OK off to customer services then.

Customer services turned out to be a lady who appeared to have lost what might have once passed for her personality, somewhere down the phone line. Despite talking me through the wrong instructions on how to open the file, I sussed out what she where she was trying to go and we got there in the end. It turned out that I had to rename the dowloaded file from its current file name to the name of the book.

That worked but maybe it would have been better if they'd told you to do that in the instructions in the first place. Hopefully they have addressed the problem how.

There still doesn't seem to be a vast choice of books available for ereaders. Are books not committed to computer automatically these days, before they're printed? Surely it can't be a big step to convert them to a downloadable file.

As a footnote to the above - I recently found The Lacuna (paperback) at Sainsbury's in a 'Buy 2 for £7' offer.  Hmmm!!!

And as a further edit - I found The Lacuna in WH Smiths on a 'Buy one get one for £1' offer - so I bought it.  Another important thing to mention is that we just came back from a week's holiday and I completely forgot to take my ereader - one of the main purposes it was bought for.  I've just watched a vid on a blog (http://broadcastingfromashed.blogspot.com/2010/07/socialnomics.html) which mentions that some universities are giving people ereader facilities instead of emails - emails being outdated.  Watch this space, maybe in a year's time we'll all have one and I'll have upgraded mine to one with some better features.