TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

The e-book gizmo as a magazine reader: How my Sony Reader helped me successfully declutter

By Ficbot

I’m going to be moving in two weeks, and as part of my preparations, I have been decluttering. My new apartment is brighter, bigger and in a much better location than my present home. I’d love to be able to entertain a little more and have a more adult social life, and piles of towering, yellowing paperback impulse buys are not exactly the epitome of the clean, open look.

So if it’s available in e-book, I am chucking it, secure in the knowledge that I can buy it later if it begs to be re-read.

Magazines a tougher decluttering target

Magazines, on the other hand, are a tougher thing to get rid of. Most of the ones I buy are cooking or fitness related, and those are much less fun to read in plain-vanilla text on a screen. My modus operandi for the fitness ones in the past when I have done such purges has been to gently tear out the articles I plan to refer to again, slide them into plastic page protectors, stick them in a binder I keep for this purpose, and be on my way.

So I started wondering if e-clipping might be the way to go, at least for articles from magazines which have less need to be pretty.

I get a professional trade journal four times a year that often has wonderful articles, but also is packed with filler—one issue recently involved board elections, and almost a quarter of the issue was filler relating to these elections, candidate profiles and summaries of the issues etc. And any disciplinary action taken by the body against members has to be reported in the magazine as well. Depending on the month, that can occupy a good chunk of real estate. It simply does not make sense to keep the whole magazine just for the one or two good articles one might refer to again. I suppose I could clip the better articles like I do for my fitness magazines, but unlike an article about yoga, for example, where you have to see the pictures, this kind of magazine has no real need to be graphical.

The plusses of e-clips

The advantages of e-clipping over paper clipping are staggering. Paper clipping would reduce the clutter some, but I’d still need a physical system to store the clippings I do save, and the last thing I need is another binder full of stuff! Also, by having them in e-form, I can do the following:

• Sort and filter them using the tags in Calibre. I set up a tag for “articles” and can group them all as a collection on my Reader. This way, I can keep tem separate from my fiction and other reading. I also get a handily generated table of contents every time I do a keyword filter: a nice, tidy list of every article that’s there. In print, I would have to manually flip through pages, or create such an index myself.
• Load them onto my Sony Reader or iPod for reading on the go. This will be especially handy when a new issue arrives. I can go straight to their website, download a new article and have it on my reader in five minutes! Then I can take it on the subway, read it on the go and not need to worry about carrying around the magazine.
• Cut and paste into a Word document. I have been saving the ones I’ve “clipped” so far as HTML files, and while I was sorting them, I found one which will be relevant to a project I am working on for a course. It will be a snap to just type its title into my computer’s search bar, pull up the article and snip the quote or two I plan to use.
• Make use of the Sony’s bookmarks feature to highlight the parts I especially want to refer to later. Again, if I am taking a course and plan to cite an article from this magazine in my coursework, this will be a huge help. These are far from novel-length epics, but 7-8 magazine pages is about 12-15 Sony screens, so the articles are long enough that this feature will be handy. And I can do it all one-handed, on the subway! Such are the delights or research in the e-age.

I was prepared to borrow a scanner, or type the articles manually if need be, but to my delight, I found that the magazine posts full text of each issue’s main feature and regular departments. I spent a happy hour or so opening up the articles I wanted, then cutting and pasting them into Kompozer to get nice, clean HTML. I can convert this in Calibre to the format of my choosing and have all my articles ready to go. There’s one more shelf I’ve cleared off before my move!