E-Reading, or Nooky

With the terrible move and everything it would be safe to say that life's been rough this past couple of months. So to cheer me up my parents bought me an e-reader. It's a black and white Nook which is just the reader I wanted. Natively handles more (and more common) formats than the Kindle, has the long life and daylight reading screen that I so desired and the page turns are quite fast with the most recent OS update. I'd say I've been enjoying it thoroughly for the past week or so.

And then I plugged it into Calibre. And now I'm in love. And now I shall count the ways.

First of all, there are the Calibre plugins. Floating out there are a set of plugins for Calibre that will remove the DRM from the following formats: epub, pdb, pdf, kindle. That means with Calibre I can buy books from damn near any book vendor and free it. I have finished a book that I originally bought from Amazon on my Nook and that is a beautiful thing. It means my e-books are as versatile as my paper ones. But I knew about that going in.

My pleasant surprise is that Calibre is damn good at converting a standard digital comic book (cbr/cbz) to a perfectly formatted epub. I can transfer my comics from my computer to my Nook in just a few clicks and the pages are sized down and converted to black and white. The pages are a bit small but the display is so sharp I can read the text fine on the comics I've tried so far.

And then there's just the simplicity of it all. It's like what iTunes should be doing for music (but doesn't); it easily takes my books and lets me do two way transfers between my laptop, desktop, phone and Nook.

This isn't a post pushing the Nook over other e-readers. Like all tech, each device has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. The Kindle is better for certain things, the iPad for others and an Android phone for other things. What is amazing is how some free software can make the e-book environment as convenient and open as it should be, despite the best attempts by book sellers at locking libraries to branded tools. Now, rather than lending a Barnes and Noble book to someone once for a week I can lend anyone an ebook until they finish it. That moves my ebooks from being a crippled digital gimmick into the realm of being a real alternative to a paper and glue edition. And it's great.