Share your ebook reader with an SD memory card

Ebook readers can hold loads and loads of books – that’s one of the nice things about the printed word being so small in electronic terms. A writer’s whole lifetime output can be stored in a few megabytes – less than the space of a single Spice Girls CD. And there are few writers (apart from JK Rowling) that are worth less to literature than the Spice Girls are to music.

Anyway what this means is that you can carry round your whole ebook library on a single SD card like the one in your digital camera. Thousands and thousands of books will fit on to a 4 Gigabyte SD card, and I make sure that I keep a backup of all my stuff on an SD card in my wallet so that wherever I am, if I happen not to have my ebook reader with me, I can just pop my SD card into one of my mates’ readers and off I go.

The downside of course is that they do the same with my ebook reader, and as often as not when I want my latest literary fix, I have to turf Ned or Sarah off my ebook reader, remove their SD card and plug my own in.

SD cards have plunged in price since I first got one a few years back for my digital camera, and now you can buy them along with the groceries.

But be careful, to some extent you still get what you pay for and saving a pound or two by not buying a named card from somebody like Sandisk could be a false economy. I always use Sandisk SD cards for my ebook readers, and they’ve never let me down yet. Ned on the other hand could tell you horror stories about losing his entire library not once but twice by using SD cards from someone else, and keeping his extra secure backup copy on a card of the same make.

Even a great Sandisk 4Gig SD card will cost a lot less than a tenner, so you’re saving very little, and to me at any rate the peace of mind is worth far more than that.