My wife loves her new Sony Reader Touch. She’s got it synced up to check out books from the local library. She prints web pages and documents to PDF so that she can get to them from anywhere in a few seconds. She tried buying a book from the Sony store … but that didn’t work out so well.

But the burr under the saddle has been schoolbooks.

Her university has a partnership with a couple of different ebook retailers, but most of her books end up on iChapters, a.k.a. Cengage Brain. In theory, iChapters is an awesome business model: break up a textbook into ebook chapters and allow students to buy or rent them individually. For example, look at the prices for one of her textbooks, Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 12ed:

That particular book has 16 chapters. At $8 each, buying them individually would be only negligibly cheaper than buying the whole book outright. But some of her classes only require a handful of chapters, making individual chapters an absolute steal.

… and too good to be true.

It turns out that iChapters does a little bit of a bait-n-switch. The sample chapters are in PDF format, but the paid-for chapters are in SPDF format—a “sealed” PDF, slathered in DRM. Really, the SPDF file extension is misdirection: Acrobat can’t read it. You need an Acrobat Reader plugin to “unseal” (read: unencrypt) the PDF. This isn’t the DRM that Adobe built into PDFs. That DRM is pretty much transparent, and works flawlessly with the Sony Reader. Library ebooks use the built-in Adobe DRM to time out after 2-3 weeks, when the physical book would have to be returned.

No, let me be perfectly clear: iChapters SPDF files can only be read on your computer. They can’t be read on any eReader: the Sony Reader, Nook, Kindle, or what have you.

Better yet, the unsealer plugin disables printing to PDF (as you figure it would).
… and the files are watermarked on every single page with a large background image right in the middle—behind the text and diagrams making them tricky to read.
… and absolutely no conversion of formatting has been done—books that are formatted badly on paper, requiring lots of flipping back and forth, retain the bad formatting and now require jogging back and forth with the scroll bar.
… and the PDFs aren’t optimized: they are huge files with 300dpi images and layers obscured by other layers.
… and many of the images and text blocks have been removed, with large “unavailable due to copyright restriction” messages. (wtf, really?)
… and, oh yeah, the chapters are really rentals, too. The license to read them times out, even though you don’t learn that until after you “buy”.

In short: excellent idea, horrible execution.

All this can be yours … for $0.50 per page. I pity the fools rushing out to buy an iPad as an eBook reader. If they think the user experience is going to be any better … ha!

I get the feeling that eBooks are now where MP3s were 10 years ago. I had the same experiences trying to buy MP3s to put on my Rio back then. We’ll get to a point where people stop being stupid … but it’s going to take a few more years.

The re-discovery was that I really, really can’t run in direct sunlight. It kills my energy. It was only 85°, but I started too early—while the sun was still high in the sky. That, and I tried a new route without realizing how much more exposed it is than my normal one. By the time I hit my 6-mile water stop, I was already flagging and having to work harder than I should have. I had applied sunscreen, so I wasn’t getting burned, but I could feel myself overheating.

At the 10-mile mark I had to stop for quite a bit longer than the 60 seconds I had planned. I doused my legs and neck with water from nearly every fountain I passed, but that only helped in half-mile increments. When the sun finally hit the treeline in the last 3 miles of my run I felt like a weight had been lifted, and I was able to crank it back up for a 9:00/mile finishing pace.

Long story short: I won’t be running before dusk again any time before October-ish. I’m just too much of a pansy when it comes to direct sunlight.

But! The corollary to all of this is that I really do think I’ve got my energy maintenance during a run down cold. For future reference, and those who care:

• Gel every 3½-4 miles. I prefer Hammer, as Gu gives me an instant headache, but whatever works for you. Carbs per gel: 23g.

• Take a 60-second break when you gel. Seriously. Not just slowing to a walk, but to a full stop. Keep moving a little so you don’t seize up, but keep in mind that the goal isn’t to make forward progress, but to let your legs breathe and clear out all of the toxic crap that has been building up in the last hour.

• For fluids, I mix one packet of Hammer Perpetuem and one packet of Hammer HEED and split it across however many water bottles I’m going to use. The Perpetuem is meant for activities longer than 2 hours, so it’s overkill for anything less. Carbs per packet: 54g for Perpetuem, 25g for HEED.

• If I go through 3 gels and all of my fluids, that’s a total of 148g of carbs. That’s probably more than I need for just 2½ hours, but I’d rather go too high than too low and crash.

The idea part relates back to the question I asked earlier in the week: how can I stay focused on endurance runs? The audiobooks are doing a pretty good job (this week was Steven Gould’s Jumper), but I am curious to see if foreign language instruction would work. I figure that I now spend 6 hours per week running, and while that takes a hefty chunk out of my audiobook pile, I feel that I could be putting that time to better use.

Of course, it might also be a horrible idea. Right now, my runs are clarifying and calming. If I am productive during my runs, will that take away from that effect? I’m not sure. But, I’ll give it a try one some of my shorter runs next week and see how it goes. Should I go for something useful, like Spanish or Japanese? Or maybe something interesting like Cherokee, Navajo, or Maori? (No, I’m not saying those aren’t useful languages, just that I can’t imagine I’d personally ever find myself using them.)

It’s funny, but I haven’t actually spent much time on campus, and certainly not just chilling out and doing homework. Most of my degree program has been online, and when I’ve had to take a course on campus I’ve always done so in the morning so that I can book it off to work right after. All told, in the three years I’ve been working toward my degree, I’ve only had a handful of days where I spent more than 3 hours on campus.

In a story with a happy ending, this would be the part where I talked about how I was wrong, and that it’s a wonderful place with friendly animals that eat from your hand.

I wasn’t, and it’s not. It’s the beauty contestant of universities—it’s very pretty and well-maintained, just don’t try to go any deeper than that. I’m not going to go into detail, but there were at least 3 times over the course of the day where I thought to myself man, am I glad I decided not to stay here for my MS.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: UCF is home to more than forty thousand students each year. Presumably, many of them do graduate. Given that, I’m obviously in the minority when it comes to how much I loathe the place. I’m sure UCF is perfectly fine for most people. I, however, am not one of them.

And oh how nice it is to have finally come to terms with that.