Daily Thoughts 8/1/2010 ( Nook, CBLDF, Barnes and Noble )

Main reading room (Czytelnia Główna) of Warsaw Public Library in Warsaw, Poland, 16 July 2010, Darwinek, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, From Wikimedia

I read some more about grant writing this morning.  Hopefully, I will be able to get a trial subscription to Zoom Info which is a pay database for searching people.  It is quite useful if you are searching for people.  A lot of people in recruiting, sales, or marketing use it for lead generation.  http://www.zoominfo.com/




I went to Barnes and Noble today to look at the Nook.  I like it better than the Kindle.  It has two screens; a small lcd strip, and a larger black and white e-ink display which is kind of interesting.  You can look at book covers in color.  The navigation took a little bit to get used to.  Barnes and Noble gives away one free ebook each week. There were also sample sets of free ebooks being advertised.



 They also allow you to send a copy of a book once to another person through email for some titles through a program called LendMe.  This means there is already more sharing than the Kindle or Sony Ereader currently offers.   You can read any ebook in the Barnes and Noble brick and mortar store for up to one hour.  It is time limited.  I learned that the basic model  starts with 2 GB of memory storage which is enough for 1500 ebooks, but the memory card slot is expandable.  An 8 GB expansion card could hold a lot of books-- 6,000 ebooks.  The Nook looks like a hybrid of Ipad and Kindle with some features of both.




I also walked around the store looking at the end cap displays.  It feels like they are doing many of the same things which libraries are doing currently.  There were a few titles that I may suggest for purchase.  One of them looks especially good, Digital Photography for Next to Nothing by John Lewell.  It is about using open source software for digital photography.  I also liked the self help title Long Fuse Big Bang Achieving Long Term Success Through Daily Victories by Eric Haseltine.  As usual I bought a cup of coffee, the price of admission these days for bookstores.




While I was going through my old mail, I found a notice for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, they have new offices in New York as well as an updated website http://www.cbldf.org/  I find the organization to be quite interesting and entertaining in addition to being a defender of the first amendment.