Winemaker’s Bookshelf


I consider a book to be valuable if I refer to it repeatedly and get upset when I can’t find it.


D


evelopment of the Internet is turning my bookshelf upside down. It once took several weeks of searching through the journals in an academic library to find the references for a literature review. I now go to Google Scholar, search the topic, click on the appropriate references and read the papers that are free downloads. It now takes a few hours to complete a task that required weeks of work prior to about 1990. Amazon now reports that even among consumer-oriented books, their eBook sales outnumber printed (hardcopy) books. How long will printed books survive?


Most of my current reading consists of quickly reading articles for content rather than reading as recreation. By contrast, my wife Nancy enjoys a good read at the end the day, at about the same time as my activity level has declined into deep and regular breathing. Her current novel is her first foray into an eBook. It was ordered though our local library. Adobe Digital Editions (free) was installed on our netbook, and in spite of her being a technophobe, Nancy finds reading an eBook more convenient than reading a hard copy. Our netbook is slightly larger than a tablet computer, has a full keyboard, and can operate for about nine hours without being plugged in. The features that make it more attractive than a printed book are that it can be viewed in complete darkness; in full- screen mode the print is larger than an average paperback; and it always comes back to your page when you open the eReader program. When closed, the netbook is about the size and weight of a hardcover book. With its hard drive, I suspect it has capacity for several thousand average sized books. In contrast to a tablet computer, a netbook typically can run any software that would run on a laptop or a desktop computer,


30


By Gary Strachan Scouring the web for textbook bargains


but is almost as small as a tablet computer. I checked out


Google books to see what textbooks were available for


download. The answer was . . . almost anything. You can investigate at


www.books.google.ca.


This is the good news. The bad news is that most of the eBooks I examined aren’t discounted by comparison with their hardcopy versions.


On the other hand, if you are willing to tolerate a slightly fuzzy font and the absence of an occasional page, Google has scanned most of the text books it sells, and you can browse through most of the books for free. You can’t download the books, copy, or print them unless you buy them. A good place to start is


www.amazon.com. The Amazon site is useful because it lists both new and used prices, similar to www.alibris.com.


In some cases a good used copy can be picked up quite reasonably, but used text books are seldom available for recent publications. You can also check out www.chapters.indigo.ca. This site also lists both new and used prices. If you are a bookaholic, it may be worthwhile to get a Chapters membership for discounts on all purchases. You can find out if the book is in stock at a nearby store so you can browse it in person. The site that intrigues me is the Gutenberg Project


(www.gutenberg.org). All the books hosted on this site are non-copyright material, so there is no danger of offending anyone or being sued if you download or distribute them. Most of this material is available from Google Books as well, but I found the old books (free) easier to find at Gutenberg. Google Books has such an enormous number of listings that it takes a lot of browsing, unless you know exactly what you are looking for.


If you do a web search for General Viticulture by Winkler, the Amazon listing is the first citation. The book


One of the 480 books displayed in Google Books when the search word Enology was entered.


lists at $87.75 discounted to $69.83. Used copies are $5.22 to $101.91. No preview of the text is available. The second site is the University of California Press, the publishers. It is listed for $70. It links to Google Preview, thus most of the book can be read on the site.


The downside is that the text is displayed in a small window, about 25 percent of the screen.


The third listing is for Alibris. It lists used copies $12.13 to $121.68. No previews are available. The fourth is Google Books. The book is displayed in almost its entirety. It is searchable via hot links from the index or by key word, and it can be displayed full screen, single page or double page, the best option for browsing the whole book. The tricky bit is that I couldn’t find a price listed for it, so it may not be available from Google, either as an eBook or hard copy.


With resources such as these available, it’s getting harder to justify laying down $100 or more for newly published textbooks, but on the other hand eBooks are very expensive too. It’s a dilemma.


— Gary Strachan can be reached at gestrachan@alum.mit.edu .


British Columbia FRUIT GROWER • Winter 2011-12


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