Reading

It has been well over a month since last we spoke. I still owe you a nook review. I have a great many things queued up, but I haven't been making the time for the ones that seem like they will require effort. I almost didn't run my errands today in favour of sitting in my room watching old episodes of Top Gear. Fortunately, my hair is now shorter, my car has fresh oil, and I have a Wake County library card. I was able to motivate myself for at least part of the day.

I wired up one of the old sets of speakers I have lying around, a pair of Technics SB-L50s that my dad handed down to me. I am now regretting my actions as a three-year-old, when I thought that the paper bubbles in the middle of the speaker cones looked like fun bits to toy with. Fortunately, the speakers still sound good. I haven't been able to come up with a way to use them as full-time replacements for my computer speakers - I'll need a new desk if I'm going to accommodate speakers this big alongside my displays - but they work nicely

for bouncing sound around my room. They sound quite nice when compared to my inexpensive Logitech 2.1 setup, though I should have expected that. They're considerably more careful and - this is the best part - they are less grating with highs. I find that my head gets

tired when listening to high-frequency heavy audio with my Logitechs. I'm likely just being too picky.

Speaking of sound, I just got finished watching The Social Network with some friends. I encountered the first time I felt anything other than joy at my home theatre setup during the club scene: the bass was muddy and distorted, my sub's 6.5" driver couldn't really handle the lowest lows. Still, it's been an excellent setup for, well, everything else. I still dream of getting a larger sub and a set of floorstanding monitors (for listening to vinyl, of course), but it's hardly a pressing desire.

My efforts to make movie night a "thing" have been mildly successful thus far. I've made an effort to be the social planner for the change, even if it is just for my one event per week taking place at the same time and location. It's all part of a conspiracy to be more social. Somehow.

I've been doing a lot more reading since I got the nook. Some of the uptick is undo

ubtedly due to, well, piracy. Remember how easy it was to get music when Napster became

popular? All of a sudden there was a huge library of music to sample for free, so why not sample as much as you could? Everybody knows how to steal music now, and the industry has come around to the new model and is slowly figuring out how people want to spend money in this day and age. Book publishing is just like that, only we're in the Napster days all over again. Publishers are still overcharging and trying to build in DRM and generally make eBooks an unpleasant experience. And, as was done with music, pirates are stepping in and, at least for now, providing a superior system of distribution. For the sake of trying it, I bought a book from the Barnes&Noble store. It was, to say the least, annoying. I tried to make the purchase right from the device - as I figured most people would do. It kicked me back, saying that I hadn't entered a credit card - yet I had an ample amount of credit on my account from gift cards. I logged on to the B&N website (using a computer) and attempted to add address and credit card info. For whatever reason, the address submission form does not work in Chrome, so I had to reenter everything again in IE. Then, and only then, was I allowed to buy the book. Then I waited. And waited. Though it was only 10 minutes or so, the purchase took far too

long to appear on my nook. If I'm buying a book on the go, I want it now - not 10 minutes after

my flight has boarded and taken off. It was also very unclear which payment method was being used - whether my gift card balance was being used or whether I would see a charge on my credit card. The book did, however, eventually appear on my nook and the nook app on my phone. As best I can tell, position syncing between the two works well, though I have to remember to let my nook see WiFi before I try to read on my phone. It's a limitation of choosing the WiFi-only nook, but it's not a big deal since I do almost no reading on my phone whatsoever. Overall, the process was considerably more painful than it should have been, but now that my account is completely set up and validated, I am confident that future purchases will go much more smoothly.

The pricing of eBooks is still an issue, though. I paid $7.99 for an electronic copy of Patrick Lee's

Ghost Country. A paperback version was only $7.91. I'm no expert, but copying a file over the internet should cost significantly less than making shipping a copy made of dead trees. Sure, the author and publisher need to get paid - but there is no reason whatsoever that an electronic copy should cost more.

And with that, I am off to read.