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.

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[kip-w.livejournal.com]

My Sony Pocket Edition is still working (well, the refurb I got in exchange for my original one is still working, with occasional hints of flakiness). Right after boasting that I still have every book I've downloaded, I learned that the ones I paid for are gone. This is due to the fact that the software for the reader won't work for me any more, and Sony gave up trying to help me. ("We're not the company that does the software." "Well, who is?" silence)

So I'm just putting books in it like it's a hard drive now, and have no plans to pay for any more content for it. I've made good, as best I can, on the books I foolishly shelled out for with replacements from Project Gutenberg and other places (weeks of labor await when I get around to reformatting the original-spelling Shakespeare volumes I got from U of VA: line numbers to strip out, character names to expand, and stuff that's too complex to write about in this margin).

I do a lot of reformatting, because Gutenberg books have returns after every line, making for the sawtooth line lengths. I've worked out a fairly optimal procedure to do a book in a quarter to a third of an hour (if it's not too complex, like a book that alternates prose and verse) from plain text to PDF, but then I still find weirdness like quote marks (single and double) being invisible on screen.

In exchange for the inconvenience, I have a virtual library in my backpack at all times. I'm okay with that.