My February failed, but I think I might rethink my strategy.

Option 1: Change e-Book Reader

As previously mentioned, my e-book reader is BooksInMyPhone, a Java app.

I think I am finding it difficult to read long books on it:

  • I cannot make multiple bookmarks, it will only remember the last page I’ve read.
  • It’s not easy to cycle back through pages, to refer back to what I’ve read so far.
  • I also think there is a bug, so that sometimes, even though I am halfway through a chapter, moving up or down a page will instead bring me back to the first page of the chapter. I must then go through the painful process of scrolling back down to where I actually left off.

So I decided to look for alternatives.

Libris

I like the look of Libris eBook Reader, from its screenshots. It is not free, unfortunately, selling at US$9.95. But it does have a bookmark feature, and gives page numbers to e-books, allowing you to navigate directly to a particular page.

Not sure if it’s a reasonable price though? The iPhone app version of the reader is priced at US$2.99, and judging from the reviews and the screenshots, it could be a lot better.

Wattpad

Here’s another: Wattpad.

I just downloaded it and the UI looks pretty sweet. So far, my only gripe with it is that you don’t get to see a description of an e-book when you to choose whether to read it online or download it to your phone.

Brief off-topic rant

I am still grasping the concept of e-books as stories written by “normal” people.

I mean, back when I was an avid fan fiction reader, I saw that the quality of many fanfic writers was undeniable. Sometimes you had to sift through the heaps to get to the gems, but still, it wasn’t strange to me that these writers could be as good as, in some cases even better, than the original creators of the given works.

It’s become a mindset shift anyway that you don’t have to be big in the mainstream channels to be produce amazing things. Look at Vimeo, or Etsy. Look at the World Wide Web itself. Times are a’changing.

…And yet that particular prejudice with writing fiction, particularly by labelling them e-books, still sits with me. Something to work on. 🙂

Option 2: Choose shorter books

Seriously. Just choose shorter books.

As mentioned in January, I was stuck in Chapter 2 of “The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories” by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.

There are more than 20 stories, and the 2nd chapter alone (which I have not finished, even now!) has 19 parts. It’s the kind of book that would be better to take in bigger doses in the paperback medium, rather in tiny doses on my poor little phone screen.

Also, my initial choice of genre were the classics. I don’t really want to pay for e-books yet, and, as mentioned in my off-topic rant above, I have a kind of snobbery towards the “self-published” kind of e-book. I do think that I take longer reading classics. Thus I need to find e-books of a more contemporary variety that won’t take me as long to read. Maybe.

An E-Book in March?

I’ll try out Wattpad for awhile, and hopefully I’ll have good news at the end of the month. 😉

Alternatively, I’ll just get one of those new iPads, or a Kindle, and make my e-book reading life easier. That, or I could quit the challenge and stick to paper books. 😛