Friday Report

[adair]

I am moving forward in my effort to make space so Mike can sleep on our couch when he visits. The stacks of books are much to big to sort and make adequate decisions to keep or not, so I bought some banker's boxes and am filling them to stack in the garage. I am screening a little as I pack the boxes, and pulling out a few that I plan to read right away, but most will be brought in after Mike leaves, a box or two at a time for major work.

Making book decisions is hard. A friend does much better than I, and has collected ebooks of most of those she wants to keep. I suspect a lot that I want to keep will not be in ebook format, but some undoubtedly are. I may investigate some books, and see if I can DeDRM them so I can use them on any reader. I am happy to pay for ebooks, but I really do not want to be restricted to one brand of reader. I prefer epub as a format, but B&N epubs are restricted to B&N software. Apple books are epub; I have not tested their restrictions so I can put them on Calibre and move them to any epub reader I have.

Comments

[fred_mouse]

I must admit to a deep suspicion of epub, in that while I have something to read them now, I don't trust I will in a decade, or two, or three. In part this is because I work with electronic data, and even this week have had a query from a work mate as to whether I know anything about a potentially defunct data format in files a bit over a decade old.

[yukonsally]

I'm a degreed librarian and I agree with all of this. I won't buy an ebook. I borrow library ebooks, and if I want a copy for myself, it's paper. Same with music, I don't rely on streaming and have lots of CDs.

I did just get two copies of ebooks, of paper books I own. The author offered them for free, and she's already got my money from the paper books, so I grabbed the ebooks too. But I do not rely on the ebooks. If amazon changes their mind about the ebooks and takes them back, I still have the paper copies.

[fred_mouse]

I agree on the getting paper copies. Most of what I read in ebook is opportunistic -- I've subscribed to a couple of alerts on free books, and I download things that seem interesting. When I love a book, I then buy it in paper. So far, that has been one out of 20 or 30. Other than that, I treat it as a library.

I do have some ebooks that I'll miss if something happens -- stuff that isn't (yet) available in paper copy. But I keep an eye out for those particular authors releasing the books, and get them when I can.