Electronic Book Reader

My brother gave me an Ectaco jetBook for Christmas last year. For those of you not familiar with the item, it is an electronic book reader – plus a whole lot more. It is a spiffy looking one, too: sleek and slender, burgundy in color, with a good-sized screen to read the books on. It not only hold electronic books, but also music and photos.

The problem, however, is that it doesn’t work.

It took me a while to figure that out, too. I am not the most technologically advanced person in the world (which is odd considering the fact that my job requires me to work on computers all day long), and I tend to have a disastrous effect on anything electrical (my own electrical field shorts them out when I get worked up about things).

So when I finally realized that it really wasn’t working properly, I called the company that made it. The help desk there at Ectaco was really quite helpful, yet they really couldn’t do a thing unless I could produce a receipt proving that it was still under the one-year warranty. Unfortunately I’d waited so long to deal with the problem that my brother no longer even remembered where he bought the thing.

So, all I can do is send it back to the company and have them recycle it.

However, I have the World’s Best Big Brother – because rather than get upset at me for not having taken care of the problem back when I first got the book reader like I should have, he bought me another one!

This one is a Kindle, which is more universally recognized and should therefore be easier to deal with. I don’t physically have it yet, but it has arrived and is waiting for me to pick up at his house.

The whole reason I need one in the first place is for traveling. I read a lot, and while spending 17 hours on a plane with nothing else to do I could theoretically read 2-3 entire books. That’s just one flight, too. When you go to some of the places I’ve been to (most notably Mongolia, which took about 42 hours to get to) you have to bring a lot of books just to get there, to say nothing of having to get back. And my next trip – to Africa – I have a limit of 22 pounds worth of gear that I’m allowed to bring, so 6-8 books are not practical.

Hence the electronic book reader.

My Kindle is slim, at just over 1/3 of an inch thick. It’s lightweight, at 10.2 ounces – so it won’t take away anything from my weight restrictions. And it can hold over 1,500 books!