E-books can be a sanity-saver during power failures–a point I made earlier this year.
Why, backlit reading devices can even double as flashlights. Besides, when the lights go out, what better chance to follow the example of TeleRead CTO James Linden and read Poe stories in the dark–which he’s done even with the juice flowing?
But a blackout is as good an excuse as any, and I was happy to see e-books mentioned in Blackout survival: How did you do?, a column by Tom Gromak of the Detroit News. He writes:
Additionally, I learned that laptops and iPods and eBooks are a lot like cars: It’s best to keep their ‘tanks’ topped off in case you need them. I had let two of the three devices – the laptop and the iPod MP3 music player – run down to the point where they were useless as entertainment distractions during the outage. The one bright spot was my almost fully charged RCA eBook, a nifty device the company no longer sells with a crisp, clear backlit screen for reading digital texts. It kept me busy for hours on Thursday night.
If nothing else, I hope that the above is a morale-booster to the people trying to revive Gemstar’s e-book division.
