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levertovfanI requested and got a Kindle for the holidays. When I requested it, I imagined myself indulging in long, way-too-weighty-to-carry-around-in-my-purse nineteenth century novels while quite industriously reading up on recent academic journal articles and classic books from my field on the bus. Classic literature, classic books by Peter Drucker and Erving Goffman, Administrative Science Quarterly, the Journal of Organizational Behavior--they would all be at my fingertips when I got a kindle. It seemed like everywhere I looked in library catalogs, there were e-books available.
But I finally got around to playing with my Kindle and trying to load it up with goodies today, and it turns out that most of what I want, aside from the classic literature, is either not available or not available conveniently. Somehow I had imagined that it would be easy to upload entire volumes of academic journals in one fell swoop. But no, I have to individually select each article. Then, with each file, I have to download it, wait to attach each large file (at least when it is a massive nineteenth century novel) to an email, and then wait as Yahoo sends the email to kindle. Somehow I also imagined that classic books by Goffman and Drucker would magically be available as ebooks. But it turns out that there's not a big enough market for them yet, it seems. It also turns out that not all of the books that Google is cataloging are available for download even if you can read them in their entirety on the web. And somehow, having to stay connected to the internet while you read them online using the kindle's online access seems to defeat the purpose of having so much memory, especially since the bus might move out of internet range. Annoying. Maybe the Harvard Business Review won't have to be uploaded as a bunch of separate articles?
But I finally got around to playing with my Kindle and trying to load it up with goodies today, and it turns out that most of what I want, aside from the classic literature, is either not available or not available conveniently. Somehow I had imagined that it would be easy to upload entire volumes of academic journals in one fell swoop. But no, I have to individually select each article. Then, with each file, I have to download it, wait to attach each large file (at least when it is a massive nineteenth century novel) to an email, and then wait as Yahoo sends the email to kindle. Somehow I also imagined that classic books by Goffman and Drucker would magically be available as ebooks. But it turns out that there's not a big enough market for them yet, it seems. It also turns out that not all of the books that Google is cataloging are available for download even if you can read them in their entirety on the web. And somehow, having to stay connected to the internet while you read them online using the kindle's online access seems to defeat the purpose of having so much memory, especially since the bus might move out of internet range. Annoying. Maybe the Harvard Business Review won't have to be uploaded as a bunch of separate articles?
