Ebooks adventures

Since I moved to Hawaii, and packing space became a premium, ebooks have been slowly and surely seducing me. Of course, ebooks will never truly be able to replace the medium that was my first love. Reading off a giant honking, hot, overbright computer screen will make your eyes bleed if you try to snuggle up in bed with your “book.” If you do not have the luxury to buy one of those paper imitating fancy e-readers, then ebooks are decidedly bad for the eyes. Indeed, I think the only reason it is at all feasible is because I read fast. Really fast. Freaky fast. (Its only slighly depressing that even when “relaxing” I am still sitting at my computer, reading.) Nevertheless, it is convenient to always have a great selection at my fingertips, ebooks tend to be cheaper, and with the subsequent purchase of my ipod touch and the downloadation of Stanza (if you are at all interested in ebooks, you’ll wanna check this out) I no longer have to lug my computer around the house when reading a book.

So I’m pretty much sold. Ebooks are cheaper. Easier to acquire. Except, the most frustrating aspect of e-reading, is the lack of any damn software to help catalog, organize, edit, and sync your collection to your device.

Now stop right there.

You’re about to tell me about Calibre.

Well, buddy, I know about Calibre. I’ve tried it out. Twice. I HATE it.

I do understand that, as of right now, its the best software on the market. In fact, its pretty much the ONLY software on the market. But the UI is terribly clunky, editing and retrieving metadata from the web takes longer than it should, the “date” function only includes date added to the library (and why on earth would I care about that? Publication date is what truly matters) and the syncing with device button is just… I don’t have any words to express my frustration here. Not to mention, it doesn’t actually edit the metadata, just sorta appends its own database onto it. It also tends to devour my computer’s memory for inexplicable reasons. Why is it so difficult to find a program, like itunes, that can organize and ebook library??

And then I answer myself, because ebooks are too new. The Kindle is a scant two years old (if that), very few people have an e-reader, there a gajillion different formats all in competition with each other, and basically… I’m thinking the technology is just too new. There’s no standard equivalent of the mp3 for music. Even Stanza, blessed tool that it is, has some awfully odd kinks. It lists authors by alphabetical order of first name, for paboo’s sake. I can’t be angry at the good people who made Calibre; they are definitely trying where nobody else even realizes there’s a market. But the fact of the matter is, until the UI cleans itself up and the management gets streamlined, I just can’t deal. Its a personal choice. Plus, with the funky way ereaders react to displaying metadata, I want to find a way to edit the actual stuff, not just add Calibre preferences on top.

So in my explorations of ebook formats, metadata, readers, and syncing, I’ve come across a few options. I can start exploring MobileRead’s mobi2mobi projects, though that would involve making sure all of my ebooks have mobi format (which I don’t know enough about) plus its all done code style, which sounds like fun to learn… but then again, I am supposed to be spending hours on linguistic research, not on tidying up my ebook library. Also, I’m sure that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to the majority of folks.

On the other hand, maybe I should just give up and use Calibre in the hopes that over time it will improve.