When E-Book readers first came out, I wasn’t quite sure what to think about them.  On one hand, I love books–the smell, the heft of them, libraries in general, and having shelves of books that take up tons of space…okay, maybe I just like that, in theory.

I can’t help but wonder, are home libraries only for the benefit of appearing smart?  Because if you go in someone’s house, and they have books everywhere, you get the impression that they are well-read and intelligent.  But is the need for people to think you are smart worth all that wasted space?  And have you ever tried to take books with you in a move?  Pain in the ass!

So ultimately, I opted to try out an e-book reader for myself.  Life has not been the same for me since music went digital.  Now I know more about music than I ever did before, and am able to have large quantities in a very small amount of space.  I can just imagine how much room 60 gigabytes of CDs would take up!

Around Christmas of last year, a local grocery store advertised an e-book reader/video player/mp3 player/photo viewer for $99.  I had looked at it a few times, and the movies on the demo looked amazing, so I bought one.  It played movies great, sure, but as far as a book reader? It blew.  Chunks.  It had blue words on a black screen, the bookmark didn’t work, it would lose your page whenever it felt like it, and there was no “jump to page” option.  It also, being an LCD screen, would not hold a charge for very long.  I was reading Q&A by Vikas Swarup at the time, and I was cursing so much, I didn’t think I was ever going to finish that book!  So needless to say, the grocery store e-book reader went back before I’d even had it a week.

After some online research, I learned that readers like the Nook and the Kindle were not for me.  I do not want my books to be stored online, where the companies can take away what you’ve bought whenever they feel like it.  Some of these new electronics are just a little too elitist for me.  Give me something that reads an SD/XD card, and let me put on it what I want.

I came across one by a company I had never heard of called the Aluratek LIBRE eBook Reader Pro that seemed to match what I needed.  At the time, Buy.com had the best deal on it (Wal-Mart and K-Mart have since started carrying it), so The Boyfriend and I ordered two.  My experience with that has taught me that, at all costs, do not buy from Buy.com.  Don’t buy from Buy.com.  Do not buy from Buy.com!  We paid for two of them, and the tracking number they gave me actually was for some guy in Indiana.  He got his package, I still waited for mine.  I finally went to FedEx to get it myself, and guess what? There it was, or there half of it was.  They only sent one.  We spent the next two weeks frantically trying to contact someone, anyone, at FedEx, Buy.com, and even Aluratek, with not much help at all.  The reason I say don’t buy from Buy.com is, if anyone has Customer No-Service, as Clark Howard would say, Buy.com is it.  At least Fed Ex was sympathetic to the fact that we were seemingly out $155.  Buy.com just didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass, even accusing us of lying about it.  It’s almost impossible to get someone from Buy.com to even talk to you.  It took a threat to report the incident to the Better Business Bureau before they even acknowledged that they had goofed, and even then, they were like, “We’ll send you another one, but if you happen to find the one YOU LOST, please send it back.”  Did I mention that we opened the package AT the Fed Ex Facility, and at least ten employees there saw that there was only one reader, even though the invoice said there were supposed to be two?

Two weeks later, we finally get the other one, and it’s BLACK!  We had ordered two white ones, only received one, and then when we finally get another one, it’s not even the right color.  Have I said don’t ever buy from Buy.com yet?

This wound up being okay for us in the long run, as it’s much easier to tell which is which (Ebony, and Ivory…live together in perfect harmony…side by side….oh, I’m sorry, what?), but geez Louise!  As for the product itself, I have no complaints.  The LIBRE came with 100 books for free on a 2 GB SD card, which was awesome.  The reader will accommodate up to a 32 GB SD card, though I’m not sure even the most avid reader would need that much, as EBooks, unlike mp3s, do not take up very much space at all.  It reads several different file types, from .epub to .txt to .pdf and several others.  It saves your place even if you forget to bookmark it, most times even if you press the reset button.  The “jump to” and “table of contents” functionalities are also major bonuses.

But overall, here’s why I might not ever go back to regular books again:

I can have thousands of books at my fingertips, and the collection will never weigh more than a few ounces–This has been one of the biggest bonuses to my e-book reader.  There’s nothing like trying to get through a 1000+ page book that hurts your wrists to hold up all the time.  You also don’t have to worry about that lost sense of accomplishment you can get when you’re reading a book for forever, and it looks like you’ve only just gotten into it.

There are thousands and thousands of books available for free on the internet–I liked the people at the library, but just about any time I went to look for a book I wanted to read, they never had it.  Maybe they would have it at another library that I could reserve, but that could take weeks or months.  I can find just about anything I want on the internet, and if I can’t, I’m bound to find 100 other books I’d like to read in the meantime.  I just picked up a package this guy was giving away of philosophical books, and I added 549 new books to my library in a small amount of time, including The Art of War, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, works by Confucious, Ayn Rand, and pretty much every other person you think of when you think of philosophy, and in addition to it taking up no literal space, it took up hardly any virtual space.

You can read guilty pleasure books, and no one will know the difference–I’m not too much of a book snob, but there are books I thought I would never read just because I thought they would be stupid.  Now, should I want to take a break from heavy reading and see what all the fuss is about, I can indulge, and no one is the wiser.  For instance, I just read all of the Sookie Stackhouse novels and Eat, Pray, Love.  Would I be caught dead reading those in book form?  Probably not.  But I was able to give them a fair shake without feeling like a silly girly girl.  And it actually surprised me, because I actually found them to be quite entertaining reads, if not exactly life-changing.  (The Sookie Stackhouse books do actually get better after the first few, after Charlaine Harris gets an editor who actually looks for mistakes in the storyline.)

I read so much more now than I did before–Now that I don’t have to worry about keeping up with a book or my place in a book, reading is so much easier.  I get through books more quickly than I ever did before, and the next book is always right there waiting for me.  It’s easy to take with me wherever I go for those boring waiting periods, just waiting to take me to the next fantasy.  And I can read for days before the battery life threatens to be an issue.

So, just like with mp3s, it takes a little time to adjust, but it has been easily one of my favorite new gadgets.  In the long run, it’s just so much more efficient.  And think about it, it’s going to be much more difficult to burn books as long as there is a digital copy.  There may always be one or two books that I always keep in physical form, but my LIBRE has quickly become one of my most prized possessions.  And hopefully people will be able to tell that I am well-read and intelligent by talking to me, not by looking at what’s on my shelves.