My new toy

I usually get my taxes done at the earliest possible moment (I dread leaving them too late so I overcompensate), and this year all my paperwork was available before the end of January, so I already have my refund! I’m using most of it for sensible things, like paying down my credit card, but I wanted to get at least one fun thing, and I ended up getting this:

I’m calling it my NKDR (pronounced enkader), short for Non-Kindle Digital Reader. Eileen and I were in a silly mood when I told her I was getting it, and we came up with the acronym. It arrived yesterday, and I’ve been having fun playing with it since then.

I don’t particularly like the proprietary software that came with it (Sony’s eBook Library). It’s not particularly intuitive, doesn’t allow for much sorting or for editing of the metadata (which, since I’m planning on putting a lot of gutenberg texts on there, I’d need). Fortunately, I found a free, open-source alternative, calibre, which in addition to the things I’ve already mentioned, will also convert non-DRM ebooks from one format to another.

The reader can handle several different ebook formats (.txt, .rtf, .doc, .pdf, as well as their proprietary .lrf), which is fortunate, because there don’t seem to be a huge number of books available in their proprietary format. But most ebook stores I’ve seen offer secured pdf as one of their formats, so I don’t think I’m going to run out of books any time soon.

My main reason for getting it, though, was to use when recording, so that I could sit further away from my computer and its noisy fan.