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Old 09-05-2008, 11:52 AM   #1
seb530
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UK Users - is it worth buying?

am pondering on this one... £200 is a lot of cash.

Mainly thinking of it for my daughter (age 9) who reads endlessley and despite the presence of libraries etc, her hobby costs me quite abit of money (£10 per week min) and she gets through 2-3 books. She reads books for her age, perhaps as old as 13 and also has started to read Oliver Twist.

I have two main concerns:
- giving her an electronic device and doing away with the paper book experience. I do realise its not about moving electronically necessarily but if I were to get one it would be with the intent of saving cash and mainly getting online content
- volume of books available for her age

I would appreaciate anyones thoughts.
Also, had a look at waterstones ebook store and note two things:
- books arent much cheaper (£1-£2)?
- small selection (early days)

thanks
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Old 09-05-2008, 11:58 AM   #2
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hi seb, welcome to the site.

getting a sony for your daughter is a really nice gift ! i understand your worries about cost though. but, if she likes oliver twist, perhaps she'd be interested in other classics ; there is a huge library of public domain (classic) books available for free online, including here in our ebooks section (we've got over 6000 now ! click on "e-books" and take a look around). if you could get her to read one classic per week that would be a considerable savings already. plus it's good for her culture.

also, you're right that it's still early days, so selection of more recent books is still limited, but publishers seem to be waking up now. and you're lucky : they seem to be moving a lot faster in the UK than in France... you can also help wake them up by writing a friendly letter / email to your favorite publishers, if you can't find a certain book you want in digital format, asking them when they are planning to publish ebooks of their catalogue.

let us know what you decide !
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Old 09-05-2008, 12:05 PM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by seb530 View Post
I have two main concerns:
- giving her an electronic device and doing away with the paper book experience. I do realise its not about moving electronically necessarily but if I were to get one it would be with the intent of saving cash and mainly getting online content
Well, I would not worry about the pbook experience. Especially with children gorwing up these days... do they miss the scratchy vynal record experience, or the VCR programming experience, or the 8-track tape experience? I think not.

Quote:
Originally Posted by seb530 View Post
- volume of books available for her age
I would appreaciate anyones thoughts.
Also, had a look at waterstones ebook store and note two things:
- books arent much cheaper (£1-£2)?
- small selection (early days)
There are thousands of ebooks available.

True, ebooks aren't much cheaper... but out-of-copyright books are since they are free. There are tons of places to get these, one of them being right here, take a look at the ebook upload sections.

Small is relative I guess. There are 1240 eBook on Fictionwise in the Young Adult section. At to that the 50,000 plus "classic" ebooks at manybooks.net, the ebooks here, on feedbooks.com... there's more than she could read in a lifetime... and every day more and more are added as new books are published and also a millions of back catalog books are starting to be added to the eco system also.

BOb
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Old 09-05-2008, 12:58 PM   #4
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Hi seb,

I am delighted with my new reader and can only add a little to the above comments.

Is your Daughter OK with technical gadgets? I ask this because the only thing you have to be with this reader is patient! If you press a button, wait for it to carry out the task. It can take a few seconds for it to do that. I am not talking turning the page which takes a fraction of a second.

My Daughter is excited by the opportunity to read with it and I will be giving her a few lessons once I have mastered the idiosyncrasies myself.

My Daughter is 11 in a week or so and like yours loves books. BTW my other Daughter is 31!

As to the availability of books they are endless. I have spent the last day finding various sources on the web and putting what is currently 198 books on mine. Having a whale of a time looking a books and magazines.

So in conclusion I would say go for it. I personally think £200 is little to pay for the experience and pleasure she will get out of it. As to saving money on the purchase, well I reckon I would not hold out too much hope on that one. Buy it for the product not the savings that you might get.

Hope that helps from a day old user!

Finally if you are near to Devizes in Wiltshire send me a pm and we can meet up so you can see what I am talking about.

Best regards

Chris
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Old 09-05-2008, 03:01 PM   #5
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Go for it!

I agree with all of the other comments so far.

Some county libraries are starting to develop ebook libraries and so these can be read also and free.

As well as the selection here there is a young readers catagory at Many Books, which may have some suitable books - http://manybooks.net/scripts/categor...p?code=CHI&s=1

There are plenty of UK users here meeting up with one would be a good idea or ask Waterstones to do a product demo! If you are near North Wales I can link you up with someone in llandudno.

Regards from Spain, AndiR
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Old 09-05-2008, 05:17 PM   #6
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I think an eBook reader for a young girl is a great idea. There are any number of excellent classics available for her -- quite a few have been uploaded here at MobileRead.

Some I can heartily recommend:
  • The Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery
  • Heidi by Joahnna Spyri
  • Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  • Peter Pan by J M Barrie
  • Little Women & related series by Louisa May Alcott
  • A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

As she matures, there are even more wonderful books waiting for her to discover them.

And, over at Pan MacMillan Ebooks there are any number of children's and young adult books which appear in their catalog -- such as the Princess Diary books by Meg Cabot, Jane Blonde series by Jill Marshall, and many books by Eva Ibbotson.

Outside of the freely available "classics", there are relatively few books available for the Sony Reader. Most of those at the MacMillan site are not yet published in the ePub format used by the Sony Reader.
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Old 09-05-2008, 06:21 PM   #7
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Thanks for all the info..especially the links.
I'm going to have a good look through these sites to see what they have to offer!

Thanks also for the kind meet invites, unfortunately (and i use the word loosely ) I live in Scotland
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Old 09-05-2008, 06:37 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by seb530 View Post
Thanks for all the info..especially the links.
I'm going to have a good look through these sites to see what they have to offer!

Thanks also for the kind meet invites, unfortunately (and i use the word loosely ) I live in Scotland
Very, very loosely, I trust

There are some members up in Scotland, so you might be able to get a chance to see some yet. I doubt I'll be back up till about New Year time, but if you are still looking then, and are in or near Edinburgh, let me know and you're welcome to have a look the devices I have. Alternatively, you could have a look in this thread to see if there is anyone near you who has offered to show a device..

It also sounds like she reads and enjoys books beyond those you would expect for her age -- the classics that are freely available (and already mentioned) would be great.

I'd suggest making sure you have a built in dictionary, or add one -- I would guess that would be a great help to her.
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Old 09-06-2008, 12:47 AM   #9
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I think an eBook reader for a young girl is a great idea. There are any number of excellent classics available for her -- quite a few have been uploaded here at MobileRead.
[*]Peter Pan by J M Barrie
Peter Pan has a perpetual copyright in Britain, unless that is Great Ormond Street Hospital, who own it, closes.
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Old 09-06-2008, 04:30 AM   #10
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Hi Seb,

My Daughter now has hold of the 'reader' and is reading Prince Caspian and loving it!

She says it is easy to use and easy to read from.

As lazyscot says, whom I hope to meet up with in the coming weeks, I have seen lots of people in Scotland on the forum for you to meet up with.

Best regards

Chris
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Old 09-06-2008, 07:08 AM   #11
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just back from the shops and showed by daughter the reader in action.. quite impressed.... another £5 spent on "little women" though whilst we decide..

One question.. is there a list of the 100 ebooks included anywhere?
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Old 09-06-2008, 07:15 AM   #12
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just back from the shops and showed by daughter the reader in action.. quite impressed.... another £5 spent on "little women" though whilst we decide..

One question.. is there a list of the 100 ebooks included anywhere?
Not sure what the included books are but you could download the 11,000+ public domain books from the project gutenberg torrent. Some of those books may not necessarily be out of copyright in Britain but 99.9% would be. I won't tell if you won't
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Old 09-06-2008, 08:44 AM   #13
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I'm sorry to hear that you spent £5 on Little Women, when you could have got a good copy from here for free:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12555

It's well worth checking the MobileRead forums for any classic out-of-copyright fiction before buying it. There's a lot already converted and available in Sony format.

Paul

Quote:
Originally Posted by seb530 View Post
just back from the shops and showed by daughter the reader in action.. quite impressed.... another £5 spent on "little women" though whilst we decide..

One question.. is there a list of the 100 ebooks included anywhere?
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Old 09-06-2008, 08:55 AM   #14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by seb530 View Post
just back from the shops and showed by daughter the reader in action.. quite impressed.... another £5 spent on "little women" though whilst we decide..

One question.. is there a list of the 100 ebooks included anywhere?

Hear you are:
20,000 Leagues under the Sea, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Aesops Fables, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Ann Karenina, Around the World in 80 days, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Awakening abd Selected Short stories, Babbitt (1922), Beowulf, Billy Budd, The Black Arrow, Bleak House, The Blue Zone, Dracula, The Brothers Karamazov, Captain Courageous, Celtic Fairy Tales, The Chousans, A Christmas Carol, Common Sense, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur, The Count of Mone Cristo, Crime and Punishment, David Copperfield, The Divine Comedy, Don Juan, Don Quixote, Emma, English Fairy Tales, English Lord, Ordinary Lady, The Fall of the House of Usher, Faust, Franenstein, Great Expectations, Gullivers Travels, Hamlet, Heart of Darkness, The House of Seven Gables, The Lliad of Homer in prose Translation, The Importance of Being Earnest, Jane Eyre, A Journey to the Inerior of the Earth, The Jungle Book, Kidnapped, The Last of the Mohicans, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Letters on England, Macbeth, The Man Who Would be King, Mansfield Park, The Merchant of Venice, Middlemarch, A Midsummers Night's Dream, Moby Dick, The Odyssey of Homer, On the Origin of Species, One Red Paerclip, Othello, Paradise Lost, Paz, Persuasion, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Pierrette, Poison Study, The Portait of a Lady, Price and Prejudice, The Price, The Prince and the Pauper, The Pirse, The Ravel, The red Badge of Courage, The Republic, Rhoda Fleming, The Time of the Acient Mariner, Robinson Crusoe, Romeo and Juliet, Sandra Belloni, The Scarlet Letter, Sense and Sensibility, The Sentimentalists, The Sonnets, Sons an Lovers, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, A Tale of Two Cities, The Tempest, The Three Musketeers, Through the Looking Glass, The Tragedy of Julius Ceasar, The Tragedy of King Lear, Treasure Island, The Turn of the Screw, Uncle Vanya, Up From Slavery, Vanity Fair, Walden Or Life In the Woods, War and Peace, The Wicked Earl, The Wife and other stories, The Works of Aristotle, The Works of Edgar Allen Poe, Wuthering Heights.

Something for everyone!
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Old 09-06-2008, 11:37 AM   #15
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I'm sorry to hear that you spent £5 on Little Women, when you could have got a good copy from here for free:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12555

It's well worth checking the MobileRead forums for any classic out-of-copyright fiction before buying it. There's a lot already converted and available in Sony format.

Paul

cheers m8 but I dont have the reader yet and my daughter certainly wouldnt read it on the PC

KJA - many thanks for the list - I have gone through it and there are at least 5 books there she has on her list to read (including macbeth which I think will be too much for her lol).. that coupled with the links that have been posted is certainly making me lean towards buying the device as a practical way to read the classics for "free" on top of everything else
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