A news junkie relapses

It is 7:45 a.m. As I write this, free software I acquired yesterday is downloading newspapers onto my Sony Reader, also at no cost to me. When I am finished and have posted this piece on my blog, I will sit at our breakfast bar and read the paper over a cup of coffee, fresh eggs and toast.

I used to be a news junkie, but I broke the habit when I kicked Matt Drudge off my computer a couple years ago. The Drudge Report used to be my home page. I liked it for its many links to news organizations and current and breaking news stories. I managed to work around his apparent right-wing bent until it got to be too much during the last Presidential campaign. Reading the news off the Drudge Report first thing in the morning was part of my daily routine for years until I went cold turkey. My own blog started demanding attention and I barely managed to maintain my habit with Yahoo News and items I was picking up off Facebook and Twitter.

Lately, I have become enamored with e-book readers and have written about them a couple times for the Blog (see links below). When I first learned of them and the fact that newspapers could be downloaded onto them, I recalled my days as a commuter back in New York. I pictured myself walking to the train as my Kindle downloaded the New York Times to be read on the ride to Manhattan. Like the Dick Tracy wrist radio of my youth, it was the stuff of science fiction.

Recently, I purchased a Sony Reader and have been reading e-books borrowed from the Greene County Library web-page. I find that I am reading more now. Is it the novelty or is it the convenience? Only time will tell. In any event, as with music and movies, it appears that the Internet is becoming the delivery system for our reading materials. Don’t fight it; it’s a losing battle. By the time I finish this, I will have four newspapers on my reader to peruse.

This week, at the Library Association Board meeting, as it often does, the talk turned to e-book readers. Past-President Becky Eschliman, who continues to edit the organization’s quarterly newsletter Ex Libris, said she thought it was time for an article comparing the features of the various readers. Librarian Connie Collett has a Kindle, board member Mary Fisher has a Nook and, as I mentioned, I have a Sony Reader. These are the big three. Becky reads books with an app on her I-Pod.

During the course of the conversation, Becky mentioned that she uses an open-source program called Calibre to convert e-books to a usable format and to keep track of her virtual library. By the time I got home, she had already sent me the link in an email. I downloaded it and started exploring its features immediately.

I already had three different e-book management programs on my computer, but this was clearly the most sophisticated. However, since the Sony Reader uses the e-pub format, which is the most readily available, it didn’t seem to matter that I could convert formats, except in one very important instance; important to a news junkie, that is. Calibre has links to over 350 Internet news sites, where it can go to retrieve (in many instances) entire newspapers, convert them to your format and download them onto your reader. Some of these news sources require a paid subscription, but most of them are free and take only about two minutes each to download.

I have set the program to automatically download the BBC, Washington Post, New York Post, and Cincinnati Enquirer each morning starting at 7:15. The New York Times requires a paid subscription and I have a policy against paying for things on the Internet, especially if I can get similar content for free, so I skipped that. I may have given up commuting ten years ago, but starting this morning, as soon as I finish writing this, in fact, this is the way I get my news.

Related posts:

E(asy) Reading
Free e-books and readers
Ralph Keyes: E-books and real books