I made my first eBook purchase today. I chose the google eBook over the Amazon Kindle version as multi-device support seems much more useful. Perhaps that means I’m locking into a future iPad or Nook as my dedicated reading device. For now, my laptop and up to 5 other devices (the iPhone being one)
Book = Rework.
Most likely reading location = laptop
After buying the book at Powell’s, I had to link my powell’s account to my google books account. The powell’s account shows the list of books I’ve purchased through them (one).
The first step was reading a long winded terms of service. It could have been worse. One worrisome clause is that if Google ever loses the rights to a book (digital content), it is no longer available to me. The book goes poof.
The next step was letting Powell’s gain access to my google account. It let me pick which one. And for the paranoid, you could create a new account. It seems like I can remove these access rights, likely immediately after the flag that I have purchased the book is set.
I also downloaded the Adobe Digitals Edition software onto my laptop. Among other nifty features, I can annotate pages. It requires setting up an Adobe id/password. If you aren’t already, a password program like KeePass certainly comes in handy. This process needs 3 accounts (powell’s, google, adobe). I already had accounts though.
The book comes in two editions: as an encrypted PDF – scanned pages, or as an ePub with flowable text. Since the illustrations are important to Rework, I hope I can view it both ways to compare. It seems I can.
Nice! The annotations in the book are now links! And the images show up as expected.
One oddity. The page numbers don’t match the book. All those non-counted pages get counted.
Time to see it on my iPhone… The images are good. The flipping between pages work fine. Searching is a bonus over regular books. Browsing for free books: priceless.
Overall experience: good.
Downsides: I can’t rip out pages to post on my wall (which I probably wouldn’t do anyway). And if you come over to visit, you can’t see that I own this book (but I suspect there is an app for that and I probably could show my virtual bookshelf on my tv/monitor to impress you with my collection). But I won’t have to pack it up to move it anytime either.
I also don’t understand the need for the publisher to say “you can’t print” as I can make a screen capture and print if I really wanted. Or go to the google book page and print (in this case only pages 1-100+ and not all 250).
