Like last year, we went three times.

The picture above shows part of the huge crowd that waited patiently to get into the hall where the books were. We turned up a little after 5pm (when the sale opened), and already the hall was full. The line snaked across the yard. We waited in line for about an hour before we could enter!

I got 92 books. This includes the six books that M bought.

I dunno, but it doesn’t look like a very large pile of books, to me. Still, there’s a lot of reading here.

Funny, before the booksale I was musing publicly (on Twitter) about whether or not I would enjoy it, given my newfound love of ebooks. Well, I am happy to say that once I was in that heady atmosphere of hundreds of bookworms all rummaging through piles of books, I forgot about ebooks. I must say however that I did find myself selecting books more on their feel and on the unlikelihood of a particular title being available in ebook format. This did mean that I avoided most contemporary fiction, at least in paperback. I bought a few hardbacks, and was pleased when I got home and looked at them closer, to note that they are first editions. I also bought books I have read and loved - and either didn’t own until now because I read a library copy, or only had in paperback.

The red volumes on the floor are Chinese language titles. The large stack is part of a series of biographies of various famous people, like the Tang poet Li Bai, Confucius, Rembrandt, Kafka, and so on. The other five books are part of a series of classic Chinese works.

Finds:
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Seven issues of Meanjin
Ballada orang bercinta by Rendra (Indonesian. Poetry.)
Crossing map by Liliane Lijn. I note this book because a) it looks unusual, and b) it is the first book in my collection to be tagged “prose poetry”.

Total spent: $246. (M spent $20)

The chis, trying to attract my attention.

After my Kobo had to go back to the shop to be replaced (I’m still waiting for a new one!), I turned to my iPad as a replacement ereader.
So far, the iPad has been a pretty good ereader.

Positives

1. Content from various ebook providers can be accessed and read, thanks to the various iPad apps – I’m using Borders, Kobo, Stanza, and Amazon. In effect I have a Kobo and Kindle in one. I don’t need a Kindle to get access to Amazon ebooks – all content (at least content that is accessible to Australian readers) is available. (NB: I also have iBooks which is the iPad-specific app but content via iBooks currently provides public domain material only. The pictures show iBook.)
2. Wireless connectivity means that in many cases I can download and start reading a book almost immediately.
3. Ability to carry many books on one device. This was brilliant when I went to Melbourne recently – no more dilemmas over what book to bring with me.
4. Ability to read PDFs. The Kobo, with its small (6”) screen, did not display PDFs particularly well. This is not a problem on the iPad, which does a great job. In fact, I no longer have any need to print off PDFs – I just open such documents on the iPad. Others are also finding the iPad very good for reading PDFs.
5. Backlit screen means I can read without having to switch any lights on. This means I don’t disturb M if I wake early and feel like reading in bed.
6. Navigation is simple and quick. On the Kobo the need to click, click and then click again to get to relevant menus can be annoying at times.
7. Page turns on the iPad are very easy and intuitive – a light touch on the right of the screen for the next page, or the left for the previous page. This is contrasted with the Kobo button, which requires a bit of pressure to activate. The clicking noise the Kobo button makes can also be mildly irritating for others in the room.
8. Ability to set bookmarks in the iPad ebook apps. While the Kobo remembers which page you got up to, that’s the extent of its bookmarking capacity. If you let someone have a look at your Kobo and they flick through the particular book, you lose your page. Because I was showing the Kobo to friends, family and colleagues, this got a bit wearing after a while. (also related to points 6 and 7 above.)
9. Battery life - ~10 hours – is quite adequate for a day’s reading. It’s easy enough to charge the iPad up overnight.
10. I am finding that I just want to read, and read, and keep reading… Mind you this is not iPad specific, I had the same impulse with the Kobo. I am assuming this is due to the novelty factor, and will fade eventually.

Negatives

1. Distractions. Being able to connect to the Internet means that I can veer off to look things up (definitions, more information about a place, person, event, concept). Playing games with others and receiving an alert that the other person has made their move and it’s now my turn – right when I am in the middle of a juicy bit. (I suppose I could turn the alerts off.)
2. Backlit screen means that I find it very unpleasant to read in sunlight. Even bright lighting indoors can be a problem – if you hold the screen just so, the light can reflect off it, and can be distracting.
3. Battery life is definitely not as good as the Kobo, which can go up to 2 weeks without needing a charge.
4. Content, lack of. I seem to be reading a lot more “classic” titles, as the availability of titles continues to be an issue for us in Australia. Project Gutenberg titles, which were not attractive to me on a desktop-bound computer screen, are suddenly very good and valid reading choices. The most frustrating thing is when something is available on Amazon but not available to Australians.
5. Weight. It’s not a big deal, but the iPad can be quite heavy. I don’t find it comfortable to hold in one hand while reading. The Kobo on the other hand is very light and pleasant to hold – and won’t cause injury if you fall asleep while reading in bed and drop it on your face. The iPad could give you a black eye!

Having said all that, I am still looking forward to receiving my replacement Kobo. Its lightness, the lack of distractions (all you can do with it is read), and the fact that eInk is very comfortable on the eyes are all huge positives for me. I expect I will still be using the iPad, for Amazon material and PDFs. Talk about spoilt for choice!

One Good Thing: Going to Melbourne and meeting up with some of my favourite tweeps. Lovely to catch up with you all!

The reason for the trip was a library leadership conference, and so I also got to meet a number of library managers from around Australia and New Zealand, including a number of Big WigsUniversity Librarians. (For those who may not know, those of us who work in university libraries aren’t necessarily university librarians. In fact the term is a title and usually refers to the Uber Boss of the university library. The rest of us are usually just plain academic librarians.) It was good to hear that many of the issues I am working on in my role are common to other university libraries, and definitely good to swap stories, tips and compare our practices. A few of us amused ourselves by bumping iPhones (and Androids) to share our contacts.

One Bad Thing: The Melbourne trip was very short, and I spent most of my time in and around the hotel where the conference was held. This meant no book shopping at all!

On the other hand, I had my iPad and managed to do quite a bit of reading in the evenings between and after meals and social events. Because there was no wi-fi (pfft) in the hotel I didn’t have any other distractions.

One Thing I Learned: If there was a theme to the conference, it was this: the (university) library is in a state of transition. This was expressed in a number of different ways by the speakers: 1) we need to break the boundaries of the library, 2) the comfortable times are over, and 3) we need to keep our eyes open, and be ready for opportunities to stay relevant. This wasn’t news to me, but I’ve come away from the conference with lots to think about.

Picture shows the scene from my hotel room. Inner-city Melbourne. It was cold and wet while I was there.

As quoted by Zen Habits.

Thinking about this in the context of change in libraries and resistance to change.

This time however I will have lots to read while away:

1. Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope (currently reading, may be finished by Sunday)
2. Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope (next book in the Barchester series after Dr Thorne)
3. Can you forgive her? by Anthony Trollope (first in the Palliser series)
4. Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
5. Unknown by Mari Jungstedt
6. Four Kate Wilhelm detective novels. FOUR!
7. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (Royall Tyler translation)
8. Assorted journal articles

Such variety! And the best part, all of this on the one device, the iPad. (I do still wish I had my Kobo, but what’s that pithy saying for these sorts of situations? “First World Problems”!)

You might look at the list and wonder if I am just going to Melbourne to READ. The reality is that I will probably only have time to read on the plane. The rest of the time I will be attending a two-day seminar, and catching up with some of my Melbourne PLN. I’m looking forward to it!

This morning after loading a newly purchased book onto the Kobo, I found that something had gone seriously wrong with the display.

I don’t know what happened.

I’ve tried the usual: leaving it, switching on and off, hard reset, but that’s how the screen looks. I conclude that there’s a hardware issue here. I haven’t dropped the Kobo so am at a loss as to how this happened.

With half the screen looking as it does, books are currently unreadable on the Kobo. Normally I would be pretty devastated and annoyed at the moment. Of course, I am still kind of peeved but it’s tempered somewhat because I can use the iPad for ebook reading.  I have transfered the books I am currently reading on the Kobo to the iPad (hooray for epub!), and I’ll take it in to Borders tomorrow to see what they suggest. (And of course I can hear you all reminding me that I can still read paper books.)

It would be nice if they have some magic fix. Whatever it is, I hope it can be easily fixed. I would love to be able to take the Kobo to Melbourne with me next weekend. I wonder if it’ll just be the iPad, though…

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the book I bought was perfectly innocuous: Unknown by Mari Jungstedt. I had a $5 off voucher from Kobo so it cost me $6.

Update on the Kobo Sunday 11 July: I took it back to Borders on Friday 9 July. They are going to call Melbourne about the warranty, and I’ll be hearing from them on Monday or Tuesday.

Of course I had to get one for my black Kobo.

Luckily, of the five designs that are currently available there were at least a couple I liked.

They’re $19.95 each. I had looked at the GelaSkins site, and might have bought directly from there, but the USD$19.95 postage charge put me off. Now that I’ve actually seen how light and flat the GelaSkin packaging is, that postage cost is even more outrageous.

I am surprised that it doesn’t actually cover the Kobo completely - the sides are mostly uncovered. I don’t mind this however as this means you can still see that this is a black Kobo. Also there are a few slots and buttons and things on the Kobo and I imagine adding holes to the skin to accomodate them would have made it far fiddlier to apply.

I was a bit hesitant when thinking about getting a GelaSkin initially, because I still have unpleasant memories of how badly I used to botch the affixing screen protectors to my PDA. Happily this GelaSkin was easy enough to remove and reposition when I inevitably applied it skewif.

I do like how it feels like my Kobo has now had a makeover.

I am amused that people, me included, are willing to pay for a bit of adhesive plastic to prettify our devices. (I don’t think M is all that impressed by the GelaSkin.)

I am still enjoying reading on the Kobo.

Incidentally this GelaSkin design is “The Enamored Owl” by Alberto Cerriteno. The other designs available at Borders:

1. Keep Calm
2. Cable Cranes
3. The Soundtrack (To My Life)
4. Union Jack
5. The Great Wave

The sales assistant at Borders told me they have more GelaSkin designs and a hard leather (or perhaps it’s faux leather, she wasn’t sure) case on the way for the Kobo, but they’ve all been held up at Customs for the moment.

My find of the year may be the works of Anthony Trollope. I have finished his The Warden, and have just started Barchester Towers.

I love his description of the Reverend Obadiah Slope:

Mr. Slope is tall, and not ill-made. His feet and hands are large, as has ever been the case with all his family, but he has a broad chest and wide shoulders to carry off these excrescences, and on the whole his figure is good. His countenance, however, is not specially prepossessing. His hair is lank and of a dull pale reddish hue. It is always formed into three straight, lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precision and cemented with much  grease; two of them adhere closely to the sides of his face, and the other lies at right angles above them. He  wears no whiskers, and is always punctiliously shaven. His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef–beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality. His forehead is  capacious and high, but square and heavy and unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large, though his lips are thin  and bloodless; and his big, prominent, pale-brown eyes inspire anything but confidence. His nose, however, is  his redeeming feature: it is pronounced, straight and well-formed; though I myself should have liked it better  did it not possess a somewhat spongy, porous appearance, as though it had been cleverly formed out of a red-coloured cork.

Funny how I lacked any interest in Project Gutenberg, until I could download their titles onto a portable device.

It’s Friday, so, bouquets to all the #blogeverydayofjune bloggers - and all my readers.

‘Avagoodweegend*!

*Traditional Australian greeting, uttered on Fridays.

Thirty things I did in June:

1. Blogged almost daily.
2. Made curry puffs with my family.
3. Bought me an iPad.
4. Found, and returned a fat black pug.
5. Finished and submitted a paper for ALIA Access with @kalgrl
6. Registered to attend ALIA Access.
7. Had a haircut.
8. Discovered that I don’t mind ebooks after all!
9. Bought a new washing machine. First front loader. It’s a superb beast.
10. Went to King’s Park with my family.
11. Recovered from wrenching my ankle.
12. Watched Samson and Delilah. Sad.
13. Froze. Cold cold mornings.
14. Booked flights for a trip to Sydney.
15. Obsessed about the state of ebook availability in Australia.
16. Pondered The Future of the Academic Library. What will my job be like in 5 years? 10…?
17. Found out that a paper submitted with a colleague for ALIA Information Online has been accepted.
18. Read lots of blogs.
19. Got to know lots of librarians.
20. Enjoyed Twitter immensely.
21. Cheered for Peter Temple, winning this year’s Miles Franklin Prize.
22. Drank some nice wine.
23. Resisted the temptation to buy all the ebooks I can find.
24. Tried to walk to work daily. Tried.
25. Managed to get a booking at Tetsuya’s in October. Thanks @jadedlotus!
26. Ate too much liquorice.
27. Stayed up late (blogging!).
28. Haven’t upgraded my iPhone to iOS4. Cheating, listing what I haven’t done.
29. Wondered if I could knit socks.
30. Remembered my mum-in-law.