Small Screens

....are often useful for reading books on.

For those not in the know, my father and myself have often sought to outdo each other in certain fields of technological fiddledeedoo. One such (unvoiced, but no less for it) competition has to do with ebooks. And, in this one field, I must say that my father clearly has the upper hand. My skillful use of Limewire and the Gnutella Filesharing network was not enough to even begin to match up to his feats: I once found a copy of a rather good book on his mobile phone (I proceeded to read it on the said device. REALLY good book). His sterling discovery, however, was fictionbook.ru, a Russian site that serves up an enormous number of science fiction and fantasy novels in a variety of e-formats - all, obviously, for free. The icing on the cake, however, the pastry that made it all worthwhile, was the simultaneous discovery of FBReader, a program for our Zaurus palmtops that reads the most convenient of file formats on the above-mentioned site. The end result? My father and I now carry around a large collection of good sci-fi and fantasy in our pockets - quite literally.

And so, when, I finished my paperback copy of George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones (purchased from the excellent Sci-Fi Bokhandelen in GamlaStan, Stockholm), a little bird whispered deep and dark secrets in my ear. Instead of waiting until an opportune moment to purchase the next book in the series, why not hop onto fictionbook.ru and DOWNLOAD the damn books.

Why, what an idea.

Thus has my last two days been spent....flipping from e-page to e-page on my Zaurus 5600 as I make my way through Martin's Song of Ice and Fire.

And to that I return.