Friday 1 October 2010

The Birthday Present Review

I was a very lucky chap in respect of the my birthday presents. From the second youngest member of my family, my daughter Holly (who has lost her place since the arrival of my grandson Ryley!) came the welcome gift of some new aftershave - a small gift but she selected and paid for this herself (and no doubt with her mum's approval!) and so I was both touched and delighted to receive this.

My son Reece and his family filled a hole in my DVD and CD collection with DVDs of both the new Robin Hood film (I now have three versions of this story on DVD!) starring Russell Crowe and also Avatar. The CDs were also most welcome - especially as one of them (Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder) was replacing a copy I had stolen a number of years ago.

From work I received the quite unexpected bonus of a a £30 Waterstones gift card - as a wargamer and student of military history, not to mention an avid reader - that will certainly be put to good use!

Pride of place though went to the present that my partner Laurel got me. I am now the proud owner of a Sony PRS 600 Electronic Book Reader. What a gadget! I can best describe this as being an I Pod for books and I already have some 16 novels stored on it (including War and Peace!) and will be able to add hundreds more and so can carry around my own personal library in a gadget not much bigger than a slim paperback! Ebooks are cheaper than the printed versions and so this will give me the opportunity to acquire many titles that I would otherwise not bother with as well as being able to gap fill my existing collection. I will not be using this as a replacement for the traditional written word - I am thinking of military reference books here - but certainly for non-fiction this will be a godsend. No more lugging around great chunky paperbacks to and from work or on holiday!

I can only say a heartfelt thankyou to everyone for my various gifts - it made the occasion of my 50th birthday a really special one and so I am looking forward to the next 50 with renewed enthusiasm!

3 comments:

Paul O'G said...

Many Happy Returns mate!

Steve said...

Belated happy birthday DC (from sunny Montpellier - shame I'm working). Regarding your new e-book, check out manybooks.net, Project Guttenberg and the Baen Free Library (first couple of many SF series there like Honor Harrington).

A MUST though is google and download Calibre, a free e-book organiser, it allows you to amend titles, authors etc for consistency (and to correct errors you often get on old stuff) and change the format of Kindle and iPad books to your readers so you can also download e-books from the likes of Amazon (and they have a load of free G A Henty and H Rider Haggard for starters!)

David Crook said...

Hi Tas and Steve,

Many thanks for the good wishes and Steve, a big thanks for the ebook stuff - I had heard about Guttenburg but not the others. Baen will be a good one.

Needless to say I shall be busy downloading this weekend!

All the best,

DC