E-book frustration
By Louis-Dominique. Filed in Academia in General |
I can’t find a German-English dictionary for my Palm. Yes, there are some out there but those normally recommended in academia are not available for the Palm.
I’ve spent about 2 hours and a half looking for German-English dictionaries that I could load on my Palm. Unfortunately, many publishers still do not list electronic version of their books along with the paper version. So if I look for an German-English dictionary recommended in academic circles and find the publisher’s page for the book, I get information for the paper version only! In some instances, I know there is also an electronic version available because I see it advertised on some retailer’s web site but there is no easy way to get the publisher’s page that would describe the features of the electronic version! Relying on the retailers to advertise the electronic version is not sensible. Retailers make mistakes in recopying the features and specs, they may not list bundles that the publisher makes available, etc. Moreover, if I see an ebook listed on a retailer’s site but not at the publisher’s site, it makes me wonder whether the publisher has abandoned the electronic version. (Yes, it has happened!)
So when there is an electronic version available, publishers are making it quite hard to find about it. On top of that, it seems that quite a few dictionaries are still not available electronically. Yeah, I want to buy yet another paper book that I’ll have to carry around. In your dreams, buster! If I can’t put it on my PDA, I’m not interested.
I should say that there are German-English dictionaries for the Palm that don’t suffer from my complaints above. However, those are typically not recognized by the academic community. Yes, the opinion of German teachers matters to me since I don’t want to buy a piece of electronic trash.
For now, I’ve abandoned my search for an academically recognized dictionary. In the meantime, I’ve downloaded this free dictionary (see the Download links) and I’m going to manage with that as long as it works for me.