Books like this help keep me anti-social
In preparing to come to China, I didn't exactly have a lot of room for books to come with me, having to use my suitcase's room for things like clothing and medicine, so I was only able to bring several books to feed my love of reading.
The English-language books I brought with me
Before I left China, however, I also came up with another solution to my problems: e-books. Yes, rather than burdening myself with an absurdly large number of books, I could instead just download them in a variety of formats (PDF, MOBI, LIT, DOC, TXT etc.). Thus, I ended up downloading approximately 20 gigabytes worth of e-books. To put that in perspective, my e-book copy of Charles Dickens's novel 'A Tale of Two Cities' is 783 kilobytes, and it takes more than 1 million kilobytes to equal a single gigabyte. Simply put, I wasn't in any short supply of books.
Like this, but digitized
Something I didn't count on when I got to China, however, would be my computer's set-up. Because I have to connect to a cable to get my internet, rather than access any sort of wireless WiFi, my laptop is essentially stuck in one place. Worse yet is the terrible chair that I was given for my dorm room. As the pictures below will demonstrate, it is rusty, fairly uncomfortable looking, and is literally held together with duct tape that I brought with me from Canada:
You can only wish your chair was this amazing
I realized this set-up was not conducive to a constructive reading environment, and decided I needed another way to read my e-books. The solution was obvious: I needed to buy an e-book reader. Having only bought my cellphone on campus, I knew nothing about where to get any sort of electronics in Suzhou; however, my roommate Miguel told me that he had bought his laptop at a large electronics shopping center not far from campus, and said he'd take me there to go and see about purchasing an e-book reader. Funny enough, the electronics shopping center happened to be very near the 'totally authentic' Apple stores that I mentioned in a previous post.
A 100% 'legitimate' electronics shopping center
I first looked at several Apple iPads, which were upwards of 3000RMB, and far too expensive for something I just wanted to read e-books on.
I started asking vendors about 'e-book readers', or dianzishu (电子书) as they're called in Chinese. It was actually fairly difficult to find someone who sold them, but after several minutes of searching, I finally found a person that sold them.
The vendor was looking for an e-book reader amid the huge piles of iPads
I told the vendor that I had no problems buying a Chinese e-book reader as long as it could read English. So, 700RMB later, I had my first e-reader, a 'WeFound F630':
It's not at all a rip-off of a Kobo or a Kindle...
For an extra 150RMB, I also decided to purchase an MP3 player, which the dealer assured me was not an Apple product and proudly 'made in China.'
Because it was so obviously 'not Apple,' I named it the 'Chi-Pod'
Of course, how boring would it be if the blog post ended here, and things didn't go horribly horribly wrong with my pirated Chinese technology? Of course, the e-reader didn't work right from the start, as it refused to read PDFs, DOC, MOBI, or LITs, and thus eradicating the entire reason I bought the damnable contraption. TXT (that is Notepad) files worked on it, but it kept misreading certain letters and words as Chinese characters, making for wonderful reading like this (click on the image to enlarge):
The Chi-pod worked decently enough, though it had such a comically short battery-life it wasn't even worthwhile leaving it unplugged.
Understandably annoyed, I went back to the vendor to get a refund on my shoddy merchandise. The vendor, determined to keep my money and then-some, offered me a counter-proposal to him giving back my money: for an extra 100RMB, he would get me a fully English-language Kindle from Amazon by the next day. I decided to go against my gut instincts and agreed to the purchase.
Luckily, my paranoia turned out to be completely wrong this time, as the vendor did indeed have an authentic English-language Kindle, imported from Shanghai, from Amazon.com.
Though it's still made in China...
Better yet, the Kindle accepts all of the formats I want, and provides programs that can convert your files to formats that will be easier to read on the Kindle's screen.
Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to go and read something!
Until next time, enjoy the semi-relevant music:
Hi, Basically, have you got that guy's number? I know some people looking to buy kindles but of course can't find them here in SZ.
ReplyDeleteThat I do. According to his business card, his number is 0512-65230755. Ask for Jiang Tao (江涛).
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