June 19, 2003
eBooks and eMagazines
I've pretty much ignored the whole eBook thing. Always considered them kind of annoying, but for some reason tonight I got caught up in looking at the more modern options available. One thing that particularly caught my eye was the Zinio platform for digital magazine delivery. I normally really dislike proprietary platforms (which is why I've pretty much ignored eBooks), but this thing is pretty slick. It creates a complete digital version of a magazine (including the stupid subscription cards) and delivers it directly to your computer every month. On the surface I wouldn't think this is useful with most of the information being available on the web anyway, but there's just something cool about the presentation of the magazine format that is missing from the web sites. I hardly ever read print magazines anymore, they seem like such a waste of money for something that just ends up in the trash. However, I'm tempted to subscribe to Macworld and PC Magazine through the Zinio service. Why? There's still something to the magazine format that's compelling and you can keep an archive on the computer without worrying about a big stack of magazines taking up space. I don't know, it just seems cool plus I actually like the kind of adds you see in magazines.
I also played around with the Palm reader for OS X. I was surprised to find this fairly compelling and I was actually looking at what books are available for purchase. The main reason for this is that I've become very sensitive to having large collections of physical items, in particular books. I've owned literally thousands of technology books and they always become a tremendous burden once they reach their end of life. They're so expensive when they're new that it feels bad to throw them away or recycle them, but they also go out of date so fast that nobody will buy them for a decent price. The last time I sold some tech books I think I got $14 for about 30 books on Java, Oracle and such that were about 5 years old. So that leaves giving them away. which is also a bit of a pain and is annoying. Right now I have at least five boxes of tech books that I really don't need but at the same time can't part with either. If they were in digital form it would be so much easier, a burned CD just doesn't take up enough space to worry about. Anyway, there doesn't seem to be much of a selection in tech eBooks yet, but it's getting better. I'm now a little more optimistic that someday we may get to the point where we have a decent reader platform with a good selection of books. I'm actually getting really tempted to check out the Tablet PC for this and some other things. Oh how I wish Apple would make a tablet Mac.