Ok another trip to China and in my usual manner I need to take a book written by one of the Top Gear top three this statement obviously excludes the Stig as we all know books written by said creature make the Hamster very very sad and very scary with small arms fire. So this trip I have a new shinny pad and not one but two Android phones so the obvious choice was to buy an ebook from egooglebook. Which I did and this was good as I put it on my pad in offline mode and hence I could read it whenever and whereever I was in this WiFi free country known as mainland China. The downside has come now that I have turned over the last page is, well actually there are many, one being that the book felt the need to tell me I had finished it NO shit a useless feature which would have been better served by adding a go to page option. Next I appear to have actually read the book before. Bloody hell Clarkson are your rantings now so second nature to me that it take 360 pages to notice that I have already read them two years ago? Apparently so.

It is also apparent that my pad whilst being brilliant is also extremely annoying as it keeps ignoring my spacebar presses and I kid you not sticking down. How the fuck can a touch screen spacebar stick down? I digress, this whole ebook thing seemed like a brilliant idea I also bought the Sir Lord Cox of space and time himself’s book. So the result is that this fucking keyboard is killing me and reading Clarkson’s book was limited to my pad and one phone as the other did not download it and then refused to do so from anywhere within the PRC. The other phone for tits and giggles appears to have the lord Coxywoxys book but not the chief Clarkson’s WTF I do not know?

I also noticed that there are a million mistakes in the books with io and BBCi turning up instead of 10 and BBC1 the book of Clarkson’s ironically entitled “For crying out loud” FFS was more appropriate. I also should state that I started reading the clarkson’s book because I got so fed up trying to read lord times book as all the footnotes and page references did not match the page select scrollbar thing was as sensitive as a cow threading a needle and of course this being egooglebooks there is no go to page option. Small aside I’ve just changed from, the Asus keyboard to the stock android one and now I am typing like a tropper. Except all the bottons are in the wrong place now and it still every now and then types a random character which it seems to auto correct quite nicely.

So what on earth should you make from this weeks, months rant? Well basically ebooks are great if you remember to download them in offline mode. That this will make you angry when you forget. You will spend an entire morning writing offline errors and bug reports to Google ready to send the moment you get WiFi back and egooglebooks has a long way to go before it is a proper bookshelf replacement. For a start I need a way of scanning all the barcodes of all the books I own in paper and that appear in there telling me I have the paper copy so that when I do buy it it is by choice and not by the fact that Clarky-Clarkson’s books all look very similar and being just his news paper column compressed into a more useful format with less other crap with it are very difficult to remember for 360 pages.