I want to buy the book and pay for it.

I write, I know how much work it is to write, edit, edit, edit and then publish a book. It’s hours and days and months and years of work. So, I want to pay for that service. However, I’d also like to be able to enjoy the easiness of e-books. Be at home, log on, click onto the title and then download it. Not having to go to the store and buy them. However, half the e-books I’d like to have are not available in my country due to copyright reasons.

This is annoying.

Why is it so hard to get the license for the e-book if you’re selling the paperback and the hard-cover? I thought e-readers were supposed to make things easier, but lately it seems I’ve mostly been trying to hunt down books I can even get onto my e-reader. Instead of reading.

• The books? Definitely not read. Need to go back to the books during September. 7 books aren’t too much in 4 weeks and I couldn’t even read one of those that I wanted to read. So, fail.
• The outline for NaNoWriMo doesn’t stand either. But the character descriptions are done. So, we’re getting there.
• Haven’t written a single word during August. So, that’s fail.
• Started cleaning my room, started re-arranging my furniture and making it more of a home for me but haven’t finished. But we’re getting there.
• Decided against jogging with my knee after all, but have continued working out on my bike, a lot and have done nearly 200km in the last two weeks of August. So, I consider that a win.
• Have started taking more pictures. But mostly with phone camera and not with the DSLR. But still, getting there.

All in all? Not happy.

Ok, not really, they ended up like this just because they felt like it. One would mean they don’t hiss at each other every time they can and one would mean they would share food and not steal it from each other and one would mean they sometimes cuddle, right? Well, they don’t.

We have a few problems with the little guy, like he loves to not listen, but that’s fine, I like a strong character. Mostly he is well trained. But he tends to be very insecure around strangers and might start barking at children and other people when he feels threatened. We’re working on that, hard work but it’s getting better and better.

He was a wild puppy, always running, never sleeping, I spent most of the first two years trying to get him to calm down and I must say there was more than just one day when he was little when I was just hoping for him to be all grown up already and finally able to sleep. Today, I now wish he was little again.

I never wanted to have one. I thought I’d die with books. But in the end I love gadgets so much that when it runs on batteries, has buttons and pretty screens, I need to have it. And when I want something, I usually end up buying it sooner or later.

I’m weird like that.

What speaks against an e-reader. Well, first of all half the books I want are not available in electronic form. Or at least not available in electronic form in my country, which is pretty frustrating and if a new book comes out and is not yet available in paperback form the price for the e-book is over 30 dollars and why would I pay over 30 dollars for a download, where I have nothing in my hands? That is beyond me.

But those aren’t even the main reasons. The main reason for me is that I love to touch a book, feel the paper, smell the paper and just own it with the cover and everything. However, I gave in because it’s wonderful to be able to drag something around that isn’t heavy and that can be taken anywhere and everywhere without troubles and that manages to store several books.

Now, let’s look at the Hanvon Hexaglott N518.

5 inch eInk screen that offers 7’000 page turns. It has a touch screen that requires the use of a stylus (but, since I find those stylish, that wasn’t a disadvantage). The stylus slots neatly in the top and as soon as you take it out the touch screen is activated and as soon as you put the stylus back the feature gets disabled again. No glare, I’ve tried many things, including jumping around in the sun and still no glare, it’s pretty difficult to get that reader to glare, unlike the Sony reader, which seems to be more than ready to glare at any moment.

You can doodle on the screen, reading books and actually taking notes and underlining words, of course that works only if the book isn’t protected by DRM.

It has a small built-in speaker with support for MP3, WAV and WMVA audio files. You can use it to play music or audiobooks but it also as a electronic reading of text built in. It supports TXT, HTXT, HTML, PDF, DOC and EPUB and has support for DRM. It has a SD card slot that you will want to use since the memory is only at 512 MB.

The reader is very stylish and the case that comes with it made of leather makes it look even more stylish. Of course it has too many buttons but since I love gadgets I won’t mind the buttons, I mean I can just ignore them. But, me as a left handed person particularly loves that the buttons to flip pages is placed in a way that it’s most comfortable while holding the device in my left hand (there’s also buttons to flip pages on the right side.)

All in all, my new favourite toy.