On my laptop, this 2-page layout with a "bookmark" offers a fair facsimile of the experience of reading a traditional book
I decided to expand my horizons recently and read a loooong format eBook - the new Dan Brown novel, "The Lost Symbol."
I bought it on Barnes & Noble's website (see my previous post on the Barnes & Noble eReader experience). Having finally figured out where to store my Barnes & Noble eBooks, I purchased the book for $9.99 (standard price for eBooks these days), and downloaded 2 "copies" of it:
- One to a network drive, accessible to both my desktop Mac and a laptop Mac.
- A second download to my iPhone, from the Barnes & Noble eReader application.
Then, I proceeded to read it on both my iPhone and my laptop, just to see how I felt about this. I like to read the kind of genre fiction Brown writes in the wee hours of the morning, so it needed to be on one of my portable devices. So, I started out on the laptop (with the 2-page view, the novel actually feels like a novel), bookmarked where I left off, and then picked up the eBook again on my iPhone.
Not unsurprisingly, the copy of "The Lost Symbol" on my iPhone had NO idea where I had bookmarked the book on my laptop. Although I knew I had bookmarked the laptop version on Page 100, the page numbering scheme on my iPhone was a little different, so, in order to find where I could resume reading, I had to search for an odd phrase from that page. It worked, and I took up again on the iPhone.
The bookmark and search features within eBooks make this all possible. Does it sound like time well-spent? Maybe not. But so far I am enjoying the read on both devices - partly because I can do it, and partly because each in its own way offers a reasonable facsimile of reading an actual paper book.
(One last caveat, however: I may or may not I feel the same way when I get to the end of this tome!
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