I love reading. I probably read more than the average person. I spend hours reading both technical computer books and entertainment books. When I first came to Thailand, one thing I really had to get used to is the lack of 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…mostly Cisco Press and Sybex books on networking. My fiction reading was mostly sated by going to a Barnes & Noble or Boarders bookstore… or the Chicago Public Library off of State and Congress when I lived there.

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

I use 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 the latest books. Considering I usually wait until a book comes out in paperback before buying it, e-books are quite expensive at $12-20 each. Fortunately, Amazon offers many free books. 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 Apple’s iPad was announced along with 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 extended reading. The Kindle app is available for other mobile platforms, such as Android and Blackberry, and even for the iPad itself.

I’ve considered buying both the Kindle E-Reader and the iPad, but honestly, they’re too big for me. I like the ability to have books in my pocket. The fewer gadgets you take 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 preferences and lighting conditions. I do much of my recreational reading in the dark before bed and find that white text on a black background is the least tiring for 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 are also available) and you can check out technical books from most major publishers, including Cisco Press, Sybex, O’Reilly, and Prentice Hall. All the big players in the IT field are represented here.

My particular subscription is $22.99 per month for the “10 slots” shelf 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 in your library. Here’s a screenshot of My CCNA Voice Study Guide in my library:

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 per 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 library, so it was probably removed due to a conflict with Apple’s library or some copy-write issues with one or more publishers.

http://my.safaribooksonline.com

I’ve tried it and it’s fine, but there’s something about a full app that seems faster and more useful. Still, the mobile option isn’t a deal breaker for Safari. When I’m reading technical books or documents, I prefer to read on my 15″ laptop screen. It’s 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 pinch. Unfortunately, not all books They are optimized for viewing on mobile devices.

That’s how I get by with my reading material in Southeast Asia. It’s wonderful to live in a time when almost everything printed on paper is also available digitally. It makes living abroad so much easier.