Week 5: Buying the Technology

I am still reading and researching other authorities on the shift to digital books, I have so many sources to shift through that i decided that i would change up this weeks writing, and discuss a personal purchase of mine.

For the sake of the course i decided to purchase an e-reader so i could experience texts in the modern, digital form. At the beginning of the course, I felt that I should always purchase my textbooks in print, but if i had an e-reader or a tablet or a kindle, that i could read my books for fun on an electronic interface. I think i enjoy having the text because i find myself wanting to collect the book on a shelf, and being able to permanently add my thoughts to a text makes the novel more important to me. I leave a part of my "self" on the pages that another wrote--that's my meta-novel.

Anyway, I discovered that I have had this bias toward the e-reader: I "BELIEVE" that I cant retain what i read when i read on a computer--and what is an e-reader but a tiny computer? In this course i am going to break this bias...by going out and experiencing a novel on an e-reader.

After coming to this conclusion i kept asking: which one do i get? so i started asking myself what i would want this e-reader to do? I need it to be able to read novels (like what i purchase from Amazon, but i also need something that can easily open (and reopen!!!) PDF and word documents. With that in mind, I marched myself down to Staples and Office Depot to pick the brain of specialists.

I discovered a lot of important things that I didn't even think about before: with technology i need to think about SPEED and SPACE as well as format. The Kindle options  offered at each location were great for reading, by the associate informed me that if i want to do any writing on my e-reader that i would be better off looking at a tablet made by computer companies than i would be with the Kindle or Kindle Fire.

Jumping from just a basic ereader search to a tablet search was overwhelming becasue of the options available to me. The largest comments that the associate said to pay attention to was the data and battery life. (what's the point to an ereader that wont last longer than 2.5 hours? I read way more than that!)

After the fact i don't remember all the different types of tablets that i looked at; but the one that i chose, i chose because it had a 10 hour lifespan,an excellent amount of data, and  the way that the tablets keyboard attached and detached was more like a laptop than just a tablet. I got the Asus Transporter Book, it is actually described as a laptop, but the screen detaches making it function like a tablet, or an ereader (like what i desired).

It wasn't until i made it home, and unpacked it that i noticed the cute, little name that my tablet/mini-laptop had. "Transporter book" . To me that term book is brought into a completely inaccurate description of what this tablet can so (the basic functioning of a laptop). Perhaps the marketing name is referring to size more than functionality then?

I believe that naming a tablet a "book" can permanently change how society interacts with the word (if that concept is catching). I feel that the concept of a new digital book is interesting. The book is object that contains a whole bunch of manuscripts or texts? If this is what a book is now, what do we call the books? texts and manuscripts, like i just did, or is there a better term to help take-on this technological shift?

 Despite the idea that this tablet "book" concept could be a catching thing; i don't think that all labeling sticks after naming, and therefore this transporter book is a small, detachable laptop that i can use as an ereader (not a "book", in more than size).