Don’t Leave Home Without It (An eBook, that is)

A couple of days ago, I complained that I was unable to blog about downloading an eBook to my phone because the data cable I'd ordered had not yet been delivered. Well, I got it yesterday and the wait was worth it (at least in terms of price). I paid less than five dollars including shipping from Amazon while the local AT&T store is asking $19.99! Anyway, I was excited to jump right in and start downloading eBooks to my BlackJack but my excitement quickly faded. For further context, I am talking here about eBooks compatible with the MobiPocket reader. Sacramento Public Library also offers Adobe eBooks but I haven't tried those yet. Here is a rundown of the good and bad of this experience.

The Good

Once you know how to do it, the process of loading an eBook onto your phone is very fast. The actual transfer of the eBook from my PC to my phone took a couple of seconds at most. And, though I've actually added two different books to my phone's library, I have still not used up even half of my available memory. That the books are so small in terms of data size surprised me. I have to admit, as well, that I fully expected to find the activity of reading a book on my phone to be less than enjoyable. Again, though, I was surprised. I read tons of email on my phone and am already used to this format. What's more, navigating through the book, is exceptionally easy. I can use the D-pad to move a page forward or back, I can use the hot-linked table of contents to jump from chapter to chapter, and I can also specify a specific page number to which I want to jump. I can view the text in multiple sizes and in full screen view. The book even reopens to the page I was reading when I closed it last time. All too easy. So now it is simple for me to bring a book along anyplace even to places I wouldn't normally want to carry an actual book. Having a book on my phone is so easy, in fact, I can even read while I'm driving! Well, maybe not, but this is definitely convenient.

The Bad

Allow me to preface my comments on the difficulties I experience by disclosing the fact that I did not read the instructions! But they are not easily noticeable on the website and, who reads lengthy instructions anyway? That said, the experience I had in successfully getting these books onto my phone worries me. I'm neither tech expert nor technophobe; however, I am very comfortable with computers in general and this process was a bit of a challenge. This makes me wonder how many of our customers will be able to manage this on their own. Generally, I don't think a service is all that useful if it is difficult to use. Of course, as I said earlier, once you've got the books on your device, it's great but the getting them there…not so much. My expectation was that I'd "check out" the book I wanted from the Library's catalog, download it to my PC, connect my phone to the PC, and load the book on the phone. Essentially, that is exactly what happens but I experienced several steps in between. In fact, I'm still not sure if I can do this on my PC running XP; I had to use my laptop running Vista to get it to work.

Basically, on my PC, my experience went something like this: downloaded the Mobipocket reader directly to my phone. At this point, I'd like to point out that one expects that downloading software to one's phone would happen from a website that is actually designed to be viewed on a phone. Not so at MobiPocket. I then checked out the book I wanted and plugged in my phone to the PC. I realized there was no way to send the checked out book from "My eAccount" on the library website to my phone so I downloaded the reader to my PC, as well. I downloaded the book to the reader on my PC feeling fully confident that I'd figured it all out. Nope. No matter how many times I tried to open the book in the reader, I was told by my obstinate PC that "The retailer website from which you have downloaded the eBook could not be identified, please re-download the eBook directly from the retailer website". I didn't like this. At this point, I was feeling a blend of emotions that primarily consisted of a desire to give up (which I'm afraid will happen often with our customers) and an overwhelming desire to conquer this annoyance even if it meant smashing my computer. By the way, I still had no way of getting the book from my PC to my phone. Then I noticed tab in the reader on my PC that suggested I add a device to my reader. Ah ha! I plugged my phone into the USB and tried. The reader wanted to know the PID number for the version of MobiPocket Reader I was running on my phone. What? So I dug around in every option I could find on the phone's reader and finally found something called a PID number. At last! But no; sorry. I didn't have the right version of ActiveSync on my computer. So I visited the website suggested by the computer and downloaded. I restarted my computer and again tried to add my phone to the device list in the reader. Sorry again. I still didn't have the right version of ActiveSync. I'm feeling frustrated just retelling this!

I finally decided that maybe my PC was jinxed so I tried on my laptop. This went a bit more smoothly. I knew I had to download the reader to my PC, I knew my PID number, and had the latest "Windows Mobile Device Center" (which is the Vista equivalent to ActiveSync, apparently). Good to go, right? Well, no. When I plugged in my phone and tried to transfer the book to my phone, my computer told me that I need to install the reader on my phone. I am not sure how to describe what I felt at that moment but, instead of doing anything rash, I tried uninstalling the software on my phone. I then plugged back into the laptop, tried to transfer the book, and, voila. The reader on the PC asked if I wanted to install software on my phone, I said "yes", it did, and next thing I know, I've got an eBook on my phone. That's really all there is to it! I hope I'm just a lot dumber than the average user that wants to read books on their phone but I'm not confident of that. This process should be easier.

Oh yeah, about collection of eBooks. I don't know if the library gets to select titles for our MobiPocket collection or if they give us what is available but, in browsing through the collection, it seemed like the majority of the 300+ titles were similar to All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire, Feisty Firefighters, and Close Encounters of the Sexy Kind. This isn't my genre, needless to say. Hopefully the choices will expand…