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The Gift Horse
Last week I received a free Sony ebook reader including a cd-rom "library" as a raffle prize from the 2009 ALA Conference.
At American Library Association Conferences there is always a huge exhibits area and many vendors there have various raffles and giveaways. I routinely let them swipe my exhibits card and then forget about it. After all, the chance of winning anything is pretty small. But this time I did win and was quite staggered by the generosity of the prize.
In a press release dated August 25, 2009, Sony announced "starting today, Sony's Library Finder application will go live. Library Finder offers visitors to the eBook Store by Sony easy access to their local library's collection of eBooks. Thousands of libraries offer eBooks optimized for the Sony Reader, and visitors can now find these libraries by typing their zip code into the Library Finder. Through the selected library's download website, visitors can check out eBooks with a valid library card, download them to a PC and transfer to their Reader."
The ebook I received was of the previous model that does not claim any access to library collections and now it did not seem as generous a prize as at first blush. Nevertheless, I was grateful and ready to get the hang of the device. "Never look a gift horse in the mouth," as the saying goes.
The reader software could not be installed on my work computer without disabling the virus protection software and even if I knew how to do that, I probably shouldn't. I brought it home and asked my ex-systems-analyst husband to install the software on our computer. Then I accessed it and was disappointed to see no books in the "library". I would have to buy ebooks to populate it. There were a few books preloaded onto the device, but I had recently read the only ones of interest to me.
I can report the reader is easy to use once an accessible ebook is chosen. The size of the print can be changed and it is easy to advance, go backward or search for a particular page. It is comfortable to hold. But I still prefer the kind of books you don't have to install, and can borrow for free from a library.
Submitted to California Libraries by:
Eve Alison Nyren
Manager
Rocklin Library, Placer County Library
Posted on November 25, 2009 9:20 AM | Permalink