I love reading. I probably read more than the average person. I spend hours reading technical computer books and books to entertain myself. When I first came to Thailand, one thing I really had to get used to is not reading paper books. There are many bookstores, but few have a large selection of titles printed in English. Back home in the States, I had a fairly large library of technical books … mainly Cisco Press and Sybex books on networking. My reading of fiction was mostly turned off by going to a Barnes & Noble or Boarders bookstore … or the Chicago Public Library out of state and Congress when I was living there.

I now have only a handful of paper books and the bookstores / libraries here are limited to any English book. Fortunately, we live in an age of digital media where most books can be found online, either for free, for a fee per book, or through membership in a book club where you can “check out” virtual books. for a monthly fee.

I use the Amazon Kindle apps for my recreational reading. I tried the Kindle and Barnes & Noble iPhone apps and found the Kindle app to be a bit easier to use. Using Amazon or any other online bookstore for recreational reading can be expensive if you want to read all the latest books. Considering that I usually wait until a paperback comes out before I buy it, e-books are quite expensive at $ 12-20 each. Fortunately, Amazon offers many books for free. Many of these books are “classics.” For years I have said that I want to go back and read many of the classic books that I missed growing up. Now I can do it in digital format. For example, I recently finished reading “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne. It didn’t cost me a hundred. I have purchased several books through the Kindle app, such as Dan Brown’s new book “The Lost Symbol.”

Just a day before the Apple iPad was announced alongside the iTunes bookstore, Amazon released a Kindle app for Windows and Mac OS X that allows you to read Kindle books on your PC or MAC. This is a nice addition and is useful for long readings. The Kindle app is available for other mobile platforms, including Android and Blackberry, and even the iPad itself.

I have considered buying the Kindle E-Reader and iPad but honestly, they are too big for me. I like the possibility of having books in my pocket. The fewer devices you carry with you, the better. The iPhone screen size really isn’t that bad and the Kindle app options give you the opportunity to customize the text size, text color, and background colors to suit your lighting preferences and conditions. I do much of my recreational reading in the dark before bed and find white text on a black background to be the least strain on my eyes.

For my technical needs, I use Safari Books Online. This is an online book “club” where you pay a monthly fee (annual fees also available) and can pick up technical books from most major publishers, including Cisco Press, Sybex, O’Reilly, and Prentice Hall. All the major players in the information technology field are represented here.

My private subscription costs $ 22.99 per month for a shelf of “10 slots” and 5 download tokens per month. A download token allows you to download the PDF of a single chapter or section of the book that is on your bookshelf. Here’s a screenshot of My CCNA Voice Study Guide on my bookshelf:

One can buy additional tokens … $ 10 for 5 tokens, but I have never needed to buy more as the tokens stack up to 3 months and I usually only download 2-3 chapters a month.

For a very short time, Safari had an iPhone app on the iTunes store, but it’s no longer available. The app was available before Apple had its own bookstore, so it was probably removed due to a conflict with Apple’s bookstore or some writing and writing issues with one or more publishers.

http://my.safaribooksonline.com

I tried it and it is fine, but there is something in a full application that seems faster and usable. The mobile option is not a deal breaker for Safari anyway. When I read books or white papers, I prefer to read on my 15 “laptop screen anyway. Nice to have the ability to use the mobile site or download a PDF and read it on my phone when I’m in a hurry. Unfortunately, not all books are optimized for viewing on mobile devices.

This is how I cope with my reading material in Southeast Asia. It’s wonderful to live in an age where almost everything printed on paper is also available digitally. Makes living abroad so much easier.