A great discovery
I discovered something great today.
I’m an avid reader (yes, all escapist fiction) and I mostly read my novels in digital form on my Sony reader. I used to belong to fictionwise.com,which is a very comprehensive and good value American site, but when it was taken over by Barnes and Noble, suddenly found I couldn’t buy half the books I wanted because I live in the wrong area. Apparently there’s something like the DVD areas thing which means you can only watch videos (or read books) from your own area. Is that daft, or what? Anyway, when I started buying from Fictionwise it was fine, but once B&N had taken it over, most of the books I wanted were denied me. So I quit Fictionwise and started looking in the UK.
Waterstones is really the main UK distributor selling ebooks, but boy, are they expensive! Unlike Fictionwise, you pay almost as much for an ebook as for a hard copy.
I found that in America you can borrow ebooks from your local library, but no such luck over here – until today!
Today I discovered that Norwich library now loans ebooks for free.
How great is that? I’ve downloaded my first three books, which I get for 21 days before they expire. Presumably, if I read them quicker than that, I can borrow some more.
I think this is terrific. I’m in for a very happy Bank Holiday weekend, curled up in an armchair listening to the rain, but deep into escapism on my E-reader.