So… I may or may not have purchased one of these earlier this week. Ahem. There’s an unconfirmed rumor that this may-or-may-not event transpired after playing with a particular person‘s recently acquired similar gadget.

At any rate, I’m amused at one particular aspect of the “ebook” phenomenon. I understand that the way most dead-tree books will become a pile of ones and zeros is through being scanned and treated with an Optical Character Recognition program, then (allegedly) proofread by a human being for error correction. The problem seems to stem from the fact that proofreaders get tired and/or bored partway through a job.

Case in point? Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book Of Swords.” Toward the end of the book I saw an entire page in which the letter “I” was turned into the number “1”, each and every time. Earlier, I saw a lowercase “y” turned into a lowercase “v”. These are understandable glitches on the part of the OCR software, but a proofreader paying any kind of attention should’ve caught them.

I don’t know what to make of another little quirk, namely that text in italics tends to be several point sizes larger than the normal text around it. This could be a problem with the particular book rather than the platform. Time will tell. I’ve only purchased two ebooks in my life so far and the other one’s not downloaded yet.

Ahem. That is, hypothetically speaking… aw, who am I kidding? Yes, yes, I’ m a sheep. I own a Nook Color. Baaaaaa.

So how is the device itself? Generally I like it. I mean, sure, if I was just going to read books all day I’d have gone for the regular e-ink device and called it good… not to mention saving $100 and potential eye strain. A big selling point for me, however, is having a 7″ screen WiFi device with a decent, working web browser. I can read books and surf the Internet? SOLD.

And to answer the geeks out there… no, I’m not going to “root” my Nook Color and turn it into a full-on Android tablet. I like the machine just the way it is, and don’t want to “break” things for the sake of being extra-geeky.

Yes, yes. I’ll turn in my alpha-geek membership card now. Big deal.