Ebooks, The Photography On The Go's Friend!
I Love Books, But They Sure Are Heavy!
Look, I love books. I have owned, read, and passed on literally thousands of books in the short time I've lived. They are the ultimate means of storing information in an easy to pickup, read, and put down format. No power requirements, other than light, and no clumsy interface. Open, flip, flip, close. Simple. The only downside is that they are kinda heavy and bulky. They are hard to make backup copies of, in case you drop one into the lake while reading from it and trying to configure your camera. They also have a nasty tendancy to age, much like we do.
When I go on a photography trip, or any kind of trip, I always bring the following with me:
- My trusty camera and complement of lenses, flashes, and memory cards.
- My trusty laptop to do image work, surf the web, check email, play games, etc. It is my desk away from my desk.
- Food, water, and clothing cramed into any space in my bag that isn't already occupied by the above.
As you might imagine, a book isn't listed on that list of must haves. Why not? Because they are bulky and heavy. If I need to go somewhere, where documentation is required, I keep it on my laptop. I can peruse the document(s) while I work on images or surf the web. I can print out the images, should I need a hard copy. I can photograph something with my camera, copy it into my laptop, import into my word processor, and voila! I've got a new document, without carrying around a book.
In a word, the only kind of books I like to keep with me on a trip are travel guides and notebooks.
But... I don't have time to scan my books!!
Well, you don't have to. Or more accurately, there are already ebooks published for much of the subject matter you might want, regarding your camera, gear, photography technique, or well... anything.
Nikon and Canon cameras are well supported in the various technical and technique related books, which are accompanied by an ebook equivelent. There are many tutorials online which provides a PDF or other ebook format. O'Reilly, the pushlisher of many good reference books has begun to make many of their works available as a PDF download. IBM has many of their technical books digitized for access through online digital libraries.
Ebooks provide added features, like searchability, copy-n-paste, and the ability to instantly print out a page for reference. No photocopier needed.
The downside, of course, is that ebooks represent valuable storage space that could be holding images/etc. So, stick the books on a DVD or on a USB drive. At around 10-300MB each, you can keep a nice little library on a DVD, or on one of the newer larger 2GB+ USB flash drives.
The Downside.... single point of failure!
It's definitely a great way to have as much information with you as possible, but at the same time, you are putting all of your eggs in one basket. If you lose your laptop or run out of power, you're kinda out of luck. In which case, that old bulky heavy book doesn't seem like such a bad idea after all. But then again, there is a trade-off. You exchange one kind of convenience for another. The answer? Get another laptop battery or make the books accessible on your PDA. Later revs of Palm, WinCE, Symbian, Linux, etc. can open and handle PDF based ebooks with relative ease.
Whatever you do, just be sure you backup your books, like you backup your images. Otherwise, you will find it is harder to find a lost ebook than the good old fashioned ones.
 | DSLR Canon Digital Rebel XT / EOS 350D eBook asin: 188238329X |
 | A Short Course in Canon EOS 5D Photography book/ebook author: Dennis Paul Curtin asin: 1928873626 |
 | A Short Course in Nikon D200 Photography book/ebook author: Dennis P. Curtin asin: 1928873707 |
 | A Short Course in Nikon D80 Photography book/ebook author: Dennis Curtin asin: 192887374X |
Technorati Tags: 