In yesterday's PAD we saw a stack, or indeed many stacks, of books which were about to hit the recycle bin or the flea market stand.

And this is part of the reason why.

Let me say clearly, I am not an Amazon fan. I like the technology, certainly the e-ink is very easy on the eye (much, much easier than the emitted light from any tablet or similar device), it's wonderful to be able to adjust the text size at will or to even have the book read to you and to be able to merely select a word to get the dictionary definition of it.

I dislike DRM, however, and I dislike the fact that Amazon has chosen not to support the open source eBook format on the kindle.

As I have previously mentioned I dislike even more book publishers who have decided to restrict supply and to start jacking up the price of e-books to even higher levels than they used to be for hardbacks, a policy which they are too stupid to see will bring piracy into the mainstream just as it did with DVDs.

But I'm currently at the stage where I desperately want to de-clutter my life in many ways, get rid of the old, bring in the new, and that includes physically. Instead of having all of those dust gatherers sitting on my shelf being consulted once every few months, now I can call them up at the touch of a button and search for what I need as well.

And if it wasn't for the stupidity and short-sightedness of the book publishers I may well have cleared double the number.

Of course the best part is that generally I'm upgrading my library at much lower cost than I would have done had I still been using pulp. Every single one of the books in yesterday's photo has been replaced by equivalent or identical content, not all of which has been from Amazon. O'Reilly in particular, with reasonable prices to start with, two for one offers to make them even sweeter, and best of all no DRM and cut price offers on edition upgrades has made a lot of this possible. I spent a couple of hundred with them, instead of the many, many hundreds I would have spent over the next year or so with Dymocks. (Sound of gunshot hitting a book retailer's foot.)

Obviously I don't have my whole collection on the Kindle at the moment; many titles are still on the PC (has anyone else noticed that the more titles you have on the Kindle, the slower the dictionary response time?), but it's a breeze to move them when I need to.

It's (long past) time for bed; I have an early start tomorrow, weather permitting. I'll try to post all of my missing PADs, and catch up with any outstanding PM's and favourite galleries that I haven't seen recently over the weekend.

Last Year