Book book book - as the chicken said

I'm the kind of person that enjoys the tactile nature of books and just the sheer beauty of the binding, cover, typography etc, so prospect of e-books and Netlibrary don't thrill this gal a whole heap.

Could you imagine curling up in bed with an e-book? I don't think so somehow.

That said, I think things like Project Gutenberg, Google Books etc are a damn fine idea - for those rare, hard to find volumes particularly.

The New Zealand equivalent the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre rocks big time. Read the original of Buller's fantastic bird book (and fondly remember the exquisite paintings which used to grace the fronts of school exercise books, Darwin's journal from the Beagle voyage and a facsimile edition of the very first Edmonds Cookbook.

As a 'user friendly' web 2.0-ish database, Netlibrary needs to get with it ... the search is so basic as to be retarded, there is no browse feature and once you start reading a book, the only way to 'bookmark' where you're up to is to remember/write down the page number and re-enter it the next time you sign in .... grump.

That said, the 'search within' feature is slightly more user friendly than google books - which is a bit like saying that a pissed off grizzly bear is slightly less dangerous than a pissed off leopard.

I'll stick to my 'real' books for now - unless I need to dig up a copy of Aristophanes' The Frogs when it will be, hi ho, hi ho, off to Net-Library I go ...