Hi there. I'm not completely new - I've posted twice and I've been lurking for a bit. I live in Decatur, which is an intown suburb of Atlanta, Georgia (US).
My partner,
Sam, and I have moved to reading e-books almost exclusively in the past year or so since we got iPod Touches. I was already reading on a Palm m130 I had "inherited" from him for a time, but a few months after he got his Touch I gave in and let him buy one for me, too. We're working on getting our daughter to switch over from dead tree media now.
Being able to carry 50 books in a pocket is part of the attraction, but for me there's also the fact that carpal tunnel in both wrists plus arthritis and fibromyalgia add up to lots of pain, and holding books is painful for me any more. The Touch is just easier - and the fact that it provides its own light is a big plus, as well. Not being tempted to lug around a tote bag full of books "just in case" I finish whatever I'm reading every time I go to an appointment makes my whole body happier, too.
I'm an avid reader - always have been. My preference is for science fiction and fantasy, first, but I also enjoy some mysteries. I don't like anything with too much of a creep factor. I read some non-fiction, as well - Robyn Silverman's
Good Girls Don't Get Fat is my most recent finish. Now I'm reading
God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero and
Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. On the fiction side, I just finished the
Clash of the Geeks anthology and began
Side Jobs by Jim Butcher and Casey Mayes'
A Deadly Row.
Another benefit of e-books: I can easily switch to whatever I happen to feel like reading at any given moment.
I try to keep track of what I'm reading at
GoodReads. I used the
WordPress plug-in Now Reading for a long time, and I really did like having things on my own site, but the Rob Miller (plugin author) has been very busy, so the plugin isn't compatible with the current version of WordPress (no dishonor to him, of course - I'm thankful that he kept it up as long as he did! Now Reading was a massive undertaking!)
However, in searching for a link for the post, I learned about
Now Reading Reloaded, which I intend to test tomorrow! (Tonight is one of my and Sam's regular date nights, or I'd be installing it right now.)
I do have other hobbies, including being a general computer geek (not so much on the hardware end these days, largely due to loss of hand strength), collecting quotations, stitching and designing counted-thread needlework, and making music. I'm a terrible blogger these days, having fallen out of the habit of posting. It isn't really a hobby, but we homeschooled my daughter from mid-elementary school through high school for several reasons, but she is now in college. (She does still live at home, for now.)
I'm a big fan of Calibre and Sigil - Calibre because we have already collected quite a few e-books in various formats, and Sigil because, well, I'm ridiculously picky. Whether I buy a book or get if from a free (LEGAL!) site, I usually find myself going a bit nutty over little errors, and now I usually open it in an editor if at all possible before I start trying to read it. (Yes, I do have an official diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it does have a hyphen, why do you ask?) I strongly prefer books without DRM for that reason.
We considered upgrading to an iPad so I could pass my Touch on to my daughter, but I found it too heavy to consider for everyday reading. It would be a lovely screen size for displaying scanned needlework patterns, though I think that would have to wait until the prices come down quite a bit.
We still have a license for and were heavy users of
Readerware at one time, but lost the data in a move-related problem, so I need to rebuild that database. While we're replacing as many dead-tree books as possible with e-books, there are some things that just don't lend themselves to bytes. For instance, you just can't have a sing-a-long without songbooks to pass around, so I'll keep collecting as many copies of
Rise Up Singing as possible and most of my other music remains printed. And until I get an iPad or something that is suitable for good graphic display, my needlework patterns will remain physical. And that means that cataloging them is necessary. Are there any other Readerware users around here?
In my pre-disability working days, I was most recently a software quality assurance analyst and technical writer. Before that, I did many other things over the years, from running a self-insured health insurance fund for the foreign missions board of a fundamentalist Christian denomination to being a call center supervisor for an ISP in the mid-80s, doing medical transcription for ER departments and setting appointments for a dating service.
I've done a lot of volunteer work since leaving the for-pay working world, especially in the internet safety field, mainly with Working to Halt Online Abuse (
http://haltabuse.org/ ). I'm not working with the group now, but I was their webmaster, then their executive VP for many years.
That's probably more than y'all wanted to know, but it's an introduction. This seems like a lovely place you have here.
Cyn