Week Two - iPad as an E-Reader

So, the official reason I bought the iPad was for my wife to read eBooks. The reality is that so far she hasn't read anything on it, however I have.

This rocks. I have read three novels already, and a couple of short stories. Some old stuff, some new stuff. Key points:
- It's heavy, compared to a book. Getting comfortable in bed with it can be tricky.
- Don't fall asleep while reading. With a regular book, the worst that will happen is you lose your page when you drop it. With an iPad, you could crack your screen. This also means you have to choose your reading position carefully. I have had a couple of near misses, and they really wake you up.
- Reading with the light out is great, means the wife isn't whinging. However, something you may not know, if that if your iPad is the only light source in the room, you tend to attract moths directly to your face. Worse still, if you despatch the moth on the iPad, wiping off the mothbits can lose you your page.

Some thoughts about downloading ebooks:
- The quality of the book is important. In this respect I mean how well laid out and formatted it is. The stuff available through Project Gutenberg is generally pretty good, but the crap at the beginning and the end makes the total number of words and pages quite misleading.
- I wouldn't recommend reading dodgy books, I tried reading one and it was really annoying. Another was so bad it was basically unreadable, with sentences jumping all over the place.
- You don't need to go mad and download a thousand. It's easier to just have a dozen or so that might take your interest, and then get them when required.
- I have read a couple of "classics" so far. The beginning of Frankenstein is totally weird. I couldn't believe how plain awful "Triplanetary" was, but was pleasantly surprised with how readable "Deathworld" is.
- I haven't yet started "War and Peace". I bet it can't be read without recharging the battery.