Tuesday, January 24, 2006

GTD and ebooks

I became aware of Getting Things Done (GTD), a few months ago from various web sites around the internet. The more I read about it, the more I became interested in it. When I decided to buy the book, about 5 months ago none of the bookstores in Jakarta carried it. Fortunately Amazon carried the e-book version. 5 minutes later, I was happily reading the electronic version of David Allen's Getting Things Done on my iPaq hw6515.
This book started a whole avalanche of e-book purchases and the beginning of e-book love-fest for me. My preferred format is Microsoft's eReader (.LIT) because of the ClearType (seriously, I mean it) and other wonderful thingies such as bookmarking and highlighting.

The reason I prefer e-books to regular books are related to the teachings of GTD itself. GTD teaches you to utilize time more efficiently. The 5 minutes waiting for a meeting to start, the 2 minutes waiting for the light to turn green, etc. Those are the times I use to read my ebook. And I carry 10 books with me all the time... in my iPaq.

One good e-commerce site I discovered for e-books -- besides Amazon -- is FictionWise. Of course, relatively speaking, the choice of e-books for sale out there is pretty pathetic. I'm pretty pissed that publishers are not offering more titles as e-books and I can't understand (or rather, I refuse to accept the explanation) why they won't do that. Even if they offer a title, the cost is the same or more expensive than the paperback edition. Why? There's no cost for paper, no cost for distribution, no cost for the middle persons. Why the high price??

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