Out with the old, in with the new

[ellarien]

Today I took my old, thoroughly retired Behemoth laptop back to the store from whence it came, and they gave me nearly $50 in trade-in for it. Which is ... about three per cent of what I paid for it in 2004, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. I feel at least ten pounds lighter with it gone -- it always was an unwieldy lump of a thing, even before it succumbed to WinXP-rot and slowed to a crawl.

Then I put the trade-in gift-card towards a basic e-reader -- a Sony Pocket Edition, which lacks a lot of the bells and whistles of more recent gadgets -- it doesn't have a touch screen or wireless or even an expansion slot, but it works fine for what I want. This way, while my dead trees are in transit I can read without being dependent on the Palm's not-so-great battery.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I have had problems with some big files, and I can't predict it. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. Huh.

I went and got Calibre and put it in. Then I edited all the author names and some tags. This was frustrating, as I would double-click the field to highlight it, and it would un-highlight without warning, and then interpret my unfinished typing as a reason to change the field order or scroll up or something. I cursed a lot, and finally adopted the expedient of typing each name in TextEdit and pasting them in, which went a little faster. It didn't do what I expected, which would have been to let me make the changes to my library and then update the Sony from it. I ended up doing everything in bulk, first deleting all the files on the Sony and then uploading them again.

I guess that's about all I needed from the Reader software. I can get Google books from Google, and those were pretty much the only things I got from them for free. Since I've formatted a number of books for the reader, some time I should make a list and send them to folks who might want them.

[ellarien]

Yes, it seems disingenuous of Sony to imply that the Google books are only available through their store! I did sign up because I wanted to treat myself to a couple of new, for-pay books for the trip home. One of them is the new Brandon Sanderson opus, which is an 8Mb file and seems to work fine, so I dunno. Maybe it's the abundance of internal links in the KJV that blows the reader's tiny mind.

I can see myself wiping the reader and starting over with a cleaner set of tags, one of these days, but right now I have more than enough cats to vacuum.