I love reading. I probably read more than the average person. I spend hours reading both computer technical books and books for entertainment. When I first came to Thailand, one thing I had to really get used to is the lack of reading paper books. There are many bookstores but few have a large selection of English print titles. Back home in the States, I had a fairly large library of technical books…mostly Cisco Press and Sybex books on networking. My fiction reading was mostly quenched by going to a Barnes & Noble or Boarders book store…or to the Chicago Public library off of State and Congress when I lived there.
Now I have just a handful of paper books and the bookstores/libraries here are limited as to any English language books. Fortunately, we live in a digital media age where most books can be found online either for free, for a fee per-book or through a book club membership where you can “checkout” virtual books for a monthly fee.
I use Amazon’s Kindle applications for my recreational reading. I tried both the Kindle and Barnes & Noble iPhone apps and found that the Kindle app was a bit more user friendly. Using Amazon or any other online bookstore for recreational reading can be expensive if you want to read all the latest books. Considering I typically wait until a book comes out on paperback before I purchase it, E-books are fairly expensive at $12-20 each. Fortunately, Amazon offers many books for free. Many of these books are “classics”. For years I’ve said I want to go back and read many of the classic books that I missed growing up. Now I’m able to do so in a digital format. For example, I recently finished reading “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne. It didn’t cost me a cent. I have purchased several books through the Kindle app such as the new Dan Brown book “The Lost Symbol”.
Just a day before the Apple iPad was announced along with the iTunes bookstore, Amazon released a Kindle application for Windows and Mac OS X which lets you read kindle books on your PC or MAC. This is a nice addition and comes in handy for extended readings. The Kindle application is available for other mobile platforms including Android and Blackberry and even the iPad itself.
I have considered buying both the Kindle E-Reader and iPad but honestly, they’re too big for me. I like the ability of having books in my pocket. The fewer gadgets I carry around, the better. The screen size of the iPhone really isn’t that bad at all and the Kindle app options gives you the opportunity to customize the text size, text color and background colors to suit your preference and lighting conditions. I do much of my recreational reading in the dark before bed and find that white text on a black background is the least straining for my eyes.
For my technical needs, I use Safari Books Online. This is an online book “club” where you pay a monthly fee (annual fees also available) and can checkout technical books from most of the major publishers including Cisco Press, Sybex, O’Reilly and Prentice Hall. All the big players in the IT field are represented here.
My particular subscription costs $22.99 a month for “10 slot” bookshelf and 5 download tokens a month. A download token lets you download the PDF of a single chapter or section of the book that is in your bookshelf. Here’s a screen capture of My CCNA Voice Study Guide in my bookshelf:
One can purchase additional tokens…$10 for 5 tokens but I’ve never needed to buy any more as the tokens accumulate for up to 3 months and I typically only download 2-3 chapters a months.
For a very brief time, Safari had an iPhone app on the iTunes store but it’s no longer available. The app was available before Apple had their own book store so it probably was removed due to a conflict with Apple’s book store or some copy-write issues with one or more publishers.
They do have a mobile optimized website at m.safaribooksonline.com. I tried it out and it’s ok but there’s something about a full-fledged App that seems faster and more usable. The mobile option isn’t a deal breaker for Safari anyway. When I read technical books or documents, I prefer to read on my 15″ laptop screen anyway. It is nice to have the ability to either use the mobile site or download a PDF and read it on my phone when I’m in a pinch. Unfortunately, not all books are optimized for mobile viewing…like mine :(
So that’s how I’m getting by with my reading material in SE Asia. It’s wonderful to live in a time where almost everything printed on paper is also available in a digital format. It makes living abroad that much easier.
