Scholarly affiliation?

Someone mentioned to me recently that I should consider obtaining formal affiliation with one university or another in my upcoming locale as an aid to my academic job hunt for 2014-2015.  The idea hadn't even crossed my mind, to be honest, so now I'm pondering whether or not to bother.  As I hear it, being affiliated simply means that you can put "University of Hoo-hah" on your name tag for conferences and print your correspondence on university letterhead, and sometimes allows you use of the library as well.  For sure, continued access to JSTOR and whatnot would be a nice convenience, but is it actually meaningful to be affiliated with a university if you're not, er, employed by them?  Would this be the equivalent of a lawyer styling hirself "Doctor X," on the principle that the juris doctor degree says "doctor" — technically true, but essentially bullshit?

For those who have opinions one way or another here, I have a few follow-up questions: whom should one approach at a university to request affiliation?  Should I hit up the chair of the pseudology department?  A colleague I happen to know a little in said department?  The dean?  The president?  The kid who hangs out by the snack machine in the student union?

How should one make the request?  Can I be direct and to the point? E.g. "I would like to be affiliated with you for technical purposes in my job search, but I won't ask you for money or even for anything at all, save perhaps access to the university letterhead." Or must I bow and scrape?  I've kind of had it with bowing and scraping for the moment, to be frank.  I only have so much energy I can devote to being smiley and glad-handy.

Ideas from the ether?

Scribd?

I'm crowd-sourcing this topic to get a survey of opinions: I'm toying with the idea of becoming a premium reader subscribing to Scribd so I can access some wonky policy papers and some medieval texts that are hard to find in print form.  (I pride myself on my catholic tastes.)  But so far, there is exactly one of each on my to-read list, and I'm not sure how much else of value to me will be on there.  I don't mind paying money for something useful, especially since some colleagues and I have just been griping about the library holdings at CBU.*  But I'd feel like a sucker paying any level of subscription fee to download two documents – although one of them is/was a full-on codex – and then find that the rest of the field is some idiot's self-published vampire novels and a bunch of dimestore romances gone digital.**

Has anyone out there in the blogosphere used Scribd's subscription service to fruitful scholarly effect?  Even if it's really only good (in my eyes) for medieval texts in RCish that went out of print 500 years ago or are simply impossible to acquire in the U.S., that would probably be worth a month's subscription to me so I could hunt them out.  And if I could look forward to downloading government and think tank papers that barely exist on actual paper, I'd be willing to do long-term.  I just don't want to throw away my money and, maybe more importantly, my research time on a wild goose chase.

* The library isn't really bad, but it isn't research-quality, either.  This goes toward a much longer post about CBU's priorities in word and in deed, but that's another cup of coffee.
** Wonder what I'm talking about?  Check out the home page.  It's not promising.

My greatest lifehack ever

My lower back has been bothering me lately, and I've noticed more that I slouch in my desk chair in an injurious way when I'm focused on my writing.  I've had the idea in the back of my mind for a while now that I should try a standing desk, particularly since Dr. Becca blogged about building her own makeshift standing desk arrangement in her office.  Now that I'm spending so much time sitting at my desk at home – with my little MacBook, not with the lovely ginormous computer at my office at CBU – my back has begun to revolt.  I nearly had back spasm until I stood up and walked away from the computer for a bit, and that was the tipping point. 

I am now standing in comfort, typing this as my computer sits on top of an obnoxiously colored file crate turned upside down.  If laziness and cheapness are our criteria, then I daresay that my solution is even more awesome than Dr. Becca's — if only because it is HOT PINK.  :D

Editing on the big screen

I added about 4000 words to the manuscript today this way.  Gotta do more of this!

Trying to be a good kid: Citation for students

I'm sitting in a Panera at a mall, since this is the only way to get both breakfast and wifi out here in the sticks.  I was getting nervous about all the repairs that my car needed, and decided to bite the bullet and take it to a VW dealership so I could get people who know their business to fix it all.  They're probably going to be working on the car through lunchtime, so they gave me a ride to the mall so that I had a slightly nicer place to twiddle my thumbs.  I am smart, though, and instead of thumb-twiddling, I have work on hand, so I went for the wifi and coffee.  I fear that the repair bill will be frighteningly close to $1000 $1300 (fuckfuckfuck), but I couldn't see any way around it.  This is why the devil invented credit cards, right?

Speaking of work, one of the syllabus-related matters on my mind is how to explain thoroughly to students how to avoid plagiarism.  I constantly sit on the fence in the argument about whether these kids nowadays don't properly understand what plagiarism is or whether they're just lying little sacks of shit trying to get away with whatever they can.  In any case, one must assume the former before getting to know them, so I need to walk them through the whole deal. 

What all should I be covering?  Obviously, there's the old-fashioned matter of how one should cite various kinds of sources.  That much is easily accomplished, and I can always tell them to consult the Chicago Manual of Style when in doubt about formatting.  Then there's the larger issue, related to doubt: when should one cite?  The traditional answer that I stand by is "When in doubt, cite."  But how do you explain this to students who do not yet recognize your version of common sense?  I'm trying to think of every situation, reasonable or not, that students could bring up.  Here's what I've brainstormed:

• A short phrase of two or three words involving technical or abstract vocabulary that they wouldn't have thought of on their own.  "A good idea" is not a phrase that one needs to cite, but "a trenchant paradigm" might be.  The latter phrase is also ugly as hell and likely a smokescreen for a bullshit artist, so it throws up more than one red flag for me.
• An idea or observation that needs a bit of explanation, even if it is phrased in the student's own words.  As much as most pseudologists are familiar with Benedict Anderson's idea of print capitalism and the effects it had on creole nationalism, I'll eat my hat if most college students know that.  Talking about that stuff without clearly citing the page numbers of Anderson's book so that I can fact-check an argument might not be plagiarism, exactly, but it's shoddy practice.  (Not acknowledging Anderson as the source of the idea at all — that would be plagiarism.)
• Then there is the occasional student who thinks that zi can copy entire pages of text wholesale, as long as the source pages are clearly cited.  What's a good way to explain to a student that zi must simultaneously cite sources clearly and write for hirself?  I imagine this would be confusing to at least some people, especially the overly cautious ones who distrust their own instincts.  Should I just forbid block quotations of more than three lines?
• Web pages.  Oy.  I would like to forbid my students from citing them at all, but of course this idea is increasingly troubled by digital access to peer-reviewed scholarship.  Even the idea that some sources are inherently less trustworthy than others can be hard to work with, since pseudologists frequently engage with things that people say and write that are verifiably inaccurate — we need to study things outside of peer-reviewed scholarship in order to do our jobs.  Is there any practical and brief way to explain to students how to be wary of the internet without throwing the baby out with the bathwater?  How do you make undergrads wary of factual truth-claims without making them paranoiac?

What other craziness am I missing?  And what say you, my esteemed colleagues, for solutions?

Frazzled: the run-on

OMG I am so tired that I can barely focus my eyes right now but despite that I am drinking an after-work beer at my desk because I'm underslept from trying to work on my syllabi and tone up the response to my readers' reports and all of that was sort of thrown off to the side last night because I had to change my cell phone number because it used to belong to some cheap thug and I was getting scary text messages and so now I'm underslept and had to go to a workshop on campus this morning and don't get me wrong the workshop is actually through Wednesday and then I have another workshop to go to on campus for Thursday and Friday for which I'm even less prepared and all I really want to do right now is finish my response and then think cool thoughts about my upper-division syllabi but I can't really do that right now because I'm a little stressed out because my entire back from my hips all the way up through my shoulders and neck is sore from helping Fie Upon This Quiet Life do a little preparatory moving and also I'm totally stressed out because my car's electrical system is slowly going on the fritz and my car title is totally fucked because the bureaucrats in Godforsaken State fucked up the odometer reading and now I'll have to get a notarized document and mail off the title certificate so that they can send me a corrected version if they feel like it and so until then I'm driving around Cornstate with expired license tags from Godforsaken State and a broken headlight cover and apparently as of last night a burnt-out turn signal and as if that weren't enough my dishwasher is on the fritz for real and I half-suspect that my leasing company will have to replace the whole damn thing so I guess it's good that I've built up so much experience in hand-washing dishes because that's what I'm still doing until they get around to that and that decreases my energy not only to cook but to worry about the subtleties of pedagogical method that this workshop is exploring and as if that weren't enough to fray my nerves I learned this morning that a family friend has died and that creates a lot of unpleasant unbloggable problems for my family so enough about that but at least I suppose I have my own health and I'm slowly figuring out my syllabi although I have four freaking days at the end of the semester for my Intro to Libel and Slander for which I literally have nothing fucking scheduled because I will have completely run out of things to say and again I must remind myself that life really could be a whole hell of a lot worse and hey I guess I've had much worse problems than my new-found difficulty in juggling schedules to go out with the sudden and I mean really sudden and unanticipated rise in women who want to go out with me and hell I suppose that if I have to take the constant low-level risk of driving with expired license tags in a dodgy car in order to have a dinner date when my work life is in overdrive and the unbloggable anxiety is rising once again then I'll just have to do that and be content that my social life is suddenly quite interesting.

Grading drives me to drink

NB: This blog is FERPA-compliant.  No small animals or cute large animals were harmed in the making of this post.  Don't ask about the big ugly ones, though.

Except for a few stragglers who may or may not provide me with acceptable excuses for make-up quizzes, I have graded all of my students' quizzes this weekend.  The scores, to be frank, suck.  I mean, damn.  I've never seen such a bottom-heavy grade distribution, across every class.  One the one hand, I kind of expected this, and intended the quiz as a diagnostic both for myself, and for them, to let them know that they'd have to take the progression of readings and assignments a lot more seriously than they seemed to believe necessary.  (Sure as hell hope that works!)  On the other hand, I was expecting the bulk of the grades to fall somewhere in the C range, not all the way down at F.  If anything, my students appear to have inverted the bell curve — the second largest group was the As.  Bizarre. 

So now I'm a little anxious about what people (my students, my colleagues, my chair, even?) will say about all this.  Am I really so draconian that most of my students were bound to fail?  I really don't feel like that — from my perspective, I've been telegraphing to them exactly what they need to do to excel, and they just stared back at me in a stupor.  I've tallied up more failing grades than all other grades combined.  How can that be normal?

...Is that normal at Ghosttown U.?  Or am I the outlier, the deviant, for expecting students to perform at minimal college level?  Hmm.

Naturally, I'm drinking now.  Apropos of Dr. Crazy's post about self-medication, I am choosing to massage my aching brain and nerves by thinking about things I like to drink.  So, along with my semi-rhetorical lamentations about grading, I'll ask my readership: what do you like to drink as a balm for your academic woes?  I have been known to indulge in whisky, wine, beer, tequila, and rum, and lately I've even discovered a cocktail at my favorite local bar that makes gin palatable for me.  Tonight's balm is a so-so pinot noir, since all the rain has made it feel somewhat chilly for the hefeweizen in my fridge.  If things really go off the rails, I also have a bottle of rye in the house at present.

Getting settled

It's just plain weird trying to get myself established here in Ghosttown.  My appointment runs for a single year, so I'm already taking note of job opportunities for next year, and yet I must also live here for this year.  That last bit is as much an admission as anything.  It's not normal to me to feel like I really live anywhere, in particular.  I haven't had a really settled address that I strongly associated with my sense of self since I left the house I grew up in, after college.  I haven't lived for more than a year at any particular location since I was in Research City for my doctoral research.  It's clear to me that it would be foolhardy to consider myself anything other than itinerant until I land a tenure-track job.  And yet I feel a certain (class-influenced?) compulsion to, for lack of a clearer impulse, "act more like a grown-up," now that I'm teaching at a university and must interact with my social surroundings as a professional, rather than a grad student who, one assumes, lives like a semi-hibernating animal. 

Since I can't get to DOU-Town to retrieve my stored possessions until next week, I currently have a cavernously empty house.  The landlord was kind enough to throw in a queen-sized bed (clean!), a little nightstand, and a little kitchen table and two folding chairs.  Nothing high luxury, but useful.  A few years ago, I would have jumped eagerly at the chance to receive more free furniture that I need not worry about moving to my next location.  But instead, I began to chafe at the idea of having nowhere comfortable to sit, and no proper work space until such time as the landlord might manage to dig out the "big, heavy" desk that he salvaged from a previous tenant; I needed to get my study set up on the double.  I let him know today that he needn't worry about it, and then I went to Office Depot and bought myself a super-cheap deeply discounted computer desk and cheap pleasingly discounted desk chair.  You know why?  Because I'm a goddamn grown-up who doesn't rely on freebies.  I fully recognize that I may be regretting this decision after a year, if I don't get another job and am reduced to living entirely on freebies by dumpster-diving behind the supermarket, but my ego simply couldn't tolerate the situation any longer.  (My back was complaining, as well.) 

I also bought myself a dresser and a larger nightstand for the other side of the bed.  That's nothing new to me, but it felt strange to shop for something solid that might actually survive a move or two, rather than some cheap crap that I would have to assemble myself and which would disintegrate as I moved it from place to place.  I haven't given up on assembling stuff: I'll have to do that with both the chair and the desk.  But my memories of losing an entire day to putting together large pieces of furniture when I could have been doing something more pleasant are still keen.  And besides, most of my tools are still in storage with my books in DOU-Town; how many damn screwdrivers and hammers do I need to keep around?  I'm already here, and so are most of my clothes; I had to put 'em somewhere.

And, no less bizarre to me, I could afford to buy something already assembled, especially since they threw in delivery for free.  I'm so accustomed to thinking of myself as living in near-poverty that I felt actual guilt about buying a dresser for $170 instead of $120.  I got over it, though: putting together a lousy piece of furniture with short longevity doesn't give me much of a sense of accomplishment, and having it delivered to my door ready to go leaves me with enough energy to deal with other stuff.  Not that I'm rolling in it now.  I'm not.  But my modest salary, which hasn't even kicked in yet, feels like a windfall after all those years of living on TAships and survival-level grants.  It's disorienting to think of myself as capable of buying more than necessities and low-level luxuries, however temporary that opportunity may be.

So now I have a good-looking dresser and nightstand, and if my engineering skills come through, tomorrow I'll have a comfy desk chair and a light, easily portable computer desk.  Next step: a good bookcase to order pre-assembled and delivered, so that I'm ready to drive up next week and unload my books.  I figure I should only get one bookcase to start, since I now have an office (weird!!) at Ghosttown U. where I can store plenty of books.  I have no idea as yet how I should divide office from home, in terms of my books; I don't envision much difference between the two for this gig.  My house will largely be dedicated toward keeping me running in the study, once I get things set up.  I'm clearly investing the most time, energy and money in my study, since I just can't bring myself to feel settled in this house, or in this town.  I'll feel a lot more comfortable when the study is up and running, especially after Thursday, when my internet service begins and I can stop hanging around the three four cafés that Ghosttown has to offer so I can be online.  (My sweet new office computer hasn't arrived yet.)

I have no plans at all yet for the living room, which will be empty in a few weeks, when the landlord reclaims the couch currently in there.  I don't watch TV, and I really don't know how much I'll be entertaining guests of any sort in this house.  What am I supposed to do with that enormous open space next to the kitchen?  If I can't find anything on the freecycle section of Craigslist, am I culturally obligated to buy a couch and a coffee table so as not to out myself as a snobby elitist academic?  What does one do with a living room, when one expects to have no guests?

P.S. Along with my books and extra clothes in storage are my kitchen implements, dishware, and glassware.  Yes, this is annoying as hell.  On the dubious plus side, though, it's making me get acquainted with Ghosttown's small stock of restaurants.  You wanna know how small-town this place is?  I found the Ghosttown entry on Citysearch, and the first result that Citysearch threw up for local restaurants was "Walmart Supercenter."  Jesus fucking Christ, what the fucking fuck am I doing here?

App suggestions

No, not applications in the usual academic sense: apps.  Yes, I have succumbed to overwhelming temptation, and bought an iPhone today.  It is black and shiny and beautiful.

Er, I mean, it will surely aid me in my scholarly pursuits!  Yeah, that's the ticket.

Anyway, as I learn the ropes of this tiny ship, I'm interested to hear from colleagues who have (and like) iPhones.  What apps do you find useful for your research?  Your teaching?  Your totally unprofessional screwing around?

Office computer

One of the perks of my new job is that the university will buy me a new computer for my office.  I can't take it with me when I go, but I get to choose which computer to install, out of the choices the IT department offers.  I'm a Mac user, so there's one question asked and answered.  The question of more importance to me is whether I should opt for a desktop or a big notebook computer.  (Those are the only two choices.)  I'm leaning toward the desktop, because the hard drive is humongous (and therefore convenient if I have to transfer some large files around) and the screen is much bigger and easier to read.  For my own purposes, that's not a huge deal, but I figure that large screens make for easier student consultations, when they want to know about their grades and so forth.  My own notebook computer is smaller than anything the IT department would install, so that will probably still be what I would carry around campus with me for presentations.

Is there anything else I should be thinking about?  Have I missed some crucial aspect of the relationship between professor and office computer?

Word processor overload

I do not consider myself a hoarder.  I was kind of like that when I was younger, but now I'm pretty happy tossing stuff when it is no longer useful to me.  Sell it off, give it away to friends, barter it, fling it far away: I like to keep things streamlined and uncluttered.

I have absolutely no excuse, then, for the fact I realized this morning: I think I have five different word processing software programs loaded on my computer now.  Four of them are, in fact, the word processor in a comprehensive office suite.  I have four full office suites in my computer now, plus a fifth word processor that rivals the office suites in MB size.  How did this happen?

When I bought my shiny happy MacBook, it came loaded with iWork, the native office suite that Apple offers with its machines.  I worried, though, that there could arise compatibility issues from emailing documents back and forth to people who use PCs, to say nothing of my own documents' formatting as I made the transition from PC to Mac.  So I bought Microsoft Office for Mac, with the educational discount.  (Without that, I might have shied away, but I can't say that for sure.)  There were two office suites right there within the first week of ownership of the computer.

Then there was the whole matter of how to deal with my material, some of which is written in RC-ian.  (The language of Research Country, of course.)  It's common for me to write field notes with RC-ian speckled through the English text, as well as longer passages at times in pure RC-ian.  As it happens, RC-ian utilizes a completely different writing system than English, which makes Latin characters a rather unsatisfactory vehicle for representing many of the sounds and letters native to RC-ian.  Sometimes it's actually useful to write in Latin characters, so that I can specify exactly how someone pronounced a given word, but more often I prefer to type RC-ian in its native script.  This has been a burden on scholars for years, since computer programming largely developed with the assumption of words being composed of a collection of isolated letters that do not change their shapes and, if need be, can be given equal amounts of space.  (Think of how Courier font looks, and why old typewritten pages look so regimental.  That's monospaced font, there.)  Such an approach is goddamn-near impossible for RC-ian.  It took a while for programmers and designers to catch up to the needs of RC-ian, which not only was never intended for monospaced font, but also – sigh – runs in the opposite direction of Latinate scripts.

Point being, when I switched from PC to Mac, I discovered that Word for Mac (unlike its PC version) has approximately zero RC-ian capability.  How would I even access my field notes without destroying them?  And Pages, the word processor in the iWork suite, wasn't really any better.  I dealt with this by downloading OpenOffice, which has genuine RC-ian capability; thus came my third office suite.  But OpenOffice didn't handle RC-ian mixed with English as well as I wanted and needed, so what was I to do?  I had heard that OpenOffice and NeoOffice were pretty much the same animal, so there didn't seem any point in trying the other one.  In my zeal/craze to find the most robust application for my specific needs, I ended up buying Nisus Writer, which is a super-powerful word processor for an enormous range of alphabetic and ideographic scripts.  (In fact, I downloaded both Nisus and Mellel, another word processor with robust language support, but I discarded Mellel at the end of its trial period.)  Nisus can handle my writing in English while bopping into RC-ian for a phrase or two at a time, and saves documents in a nicely cross-platform format (RTF).  It can also save documents as PDFs, which I have found to be the most durable and stable form for such things.  And lo, it was good.  (And for purely English-language documents, I tried using OpenOffice for a while, but eventually felt it was actually more convenient to use Word, since that's what everyone else had.)

And yet.  Even from the beginning, I noticed that Nisus has a tendency to crash for no fucking reason.  It'll just give me the little pinwheel of death, and then close itself for some "unexpected" reason, losing everything that I typed before I last hit the save button.  This has trained me to save with absurd frequency, like every half-sentence.  It's annoying, but I'm willing to tolerate it for the larger robustness of the program. 

But yesterday, Nisus began its periodic automatic update, and gave me a message that this newest upgrade wasn't free, but would cost me $49.  WTF?  I just bought the goddamn program less than two years ago!  When I looked through their list of the bug fixes incorporated in the new upgrade, and couldn't locate a fix for "crashes for no fucking reason," I balked at paying. 

So last night, I spent an hour downloading a fifth office suite: NeoOffice.  In recent months, I've heard reports that NeoOffice works better and more nimbly than OpenOffice at certain tasks, especially on Macs.  It's also come to my attention during my postdoc that NeoOffice is what Apple sales people here in RC load as standard-issue on Macs they sell to locals, who naturally want good functionality in their native language as well as English and other Latinate-scripted languages.  Even though there's a fully freeware version of NeoOffice, I paid $10 for the newest one, since I wanted as many bugs worked out as possible.  I'm taking the new word processor for a spin today to see what it can do.

Why do I feel like I can't commit to any of these programs fully?  Why the hell do I keep OpenOffice around?  Why must Word be such a pain in the ass about non-Latinate scripts that I have to go all obsessive-compulsive about finding alternative software?  How many goddamn office suites will I end up storing on my computer?

Tax time

Holy hell, would someone please tell me how to file my taxes this year?  For so many years, I had a very simple and predictable mode of filing: list minuscule earnings for the year, take the lifetime learning credit, calculate and send.  Now that I'm not in grad school any longer, and have earned income from several different sources after graduating (some academic, some not), I have no idea how to maximize my refund, or at least minimize my debt.  Can someone who has recently been in the same position give me any tips on which forms I should be filing, and why?  I'm particularly concerned about how to write up my postdoc in a way that makes clear that this is an academic fellowship and not, say, just a wad of money.

Ideas?

Access denied/Giving 'til it hurts

I didn't think this would happen, now that I'm out of grad school, but I'm feeling a fresh surge of hatred for Dear Old University.  I tried to log in to JSTOR to look up an article, and found that I no longer have access to JSTOR through my DOU affiliation.  This wouldn't be surprising if the alumni association hadn't given me (along with all other new graduates) a free year-long membership which is supposed to include access to the library resources.  Now that I look at the alumni association's website, it looks like I might be able to gain access to individual journals through them, but that would be a different login procedure, one which has to wait until they respond to my request to activate my online access to the alumni association at large.  I don't think it would let me log into JSTOR, per se, but the list of participating periodicals seems to include everything that I commonly check in on.  (I'm in a few professional organizations that grant me access to their own publications, but no pseudologist worth hir salt restricts hirself to publications of disciplinary affiliation, unless zi has either boringly narrow interests, or a lot of cash to blow on annual memberships.)

This raises the sickening prospect for me of potentially being forced by circumstances to pay even more money to DOU over the next few years, in the form of alumni association membership, in order to maintain my access to all those professional resources that usually require university affiliation to use.  It's not that the money would be so dear — it's actually a good bit cheaper than some other affiliative methods by which some people can tap into JSTOR.  It's the principle of the thing; those of you who have read my blog from the start, or have rummaged through my archives, may remember the choking rage I felt when, while being denied financial support and health insurance by DOU, they solicited donations from me.  I've never planned to give DOU a nickel if it couldn't be earmarked for whatever I wanted, and alumni membership dues go into the general kitty for frittering away by the troglodytic administrators administrative discretion.  And you know, it's not like I didn't pay them tuition for eight fucking years! 

It's not like I have a moral objection to giving a little money in recognition of what a college or university has done for its alumni.  I've been a pretty consistent giver to my undergrad alma mater, except in a few years of extreme penury.  But, to be fair, I didn't pay for that; my parents did.  I'll wager a guess that they've never sent a check to Undergrad since my last semester there.  And even for Undergrad, I always tick a box to make sure my donation is directed to the fund for need-based scholarships; hell if I'll give them money to do something foolish like build another crappy snack bar in the campus center.

But now DOU may have the last laugh on me, since I don't know when I will again have an institutional affiliation that grants me online periodical database access.  (And what if I get a job, and then get denied tenure?  It will feel even more shameful to come crawling to DOU's alumni association again.)  It's repugnant to me to slip them even more money that they will use wastefully and in violation of everything that I hold dear about academia and educational missions.  But it may an unavoidable moral compromise; I'd be cutting off my nose to spite my face, if I refused a cut-rate deal to maintain access to a bunch of journals I need to do my work.  I'll probably do it, at the very least until I get a job at a school or institute of some sort.  But I feel tainted giving in to it.

I don't suppose any of my readers has a better/cheaper idea for me to regain access to JSTOR?

E-readers: good idea or waste of money?

I met yesterday with another of my committee members, the one whose question during my defense reduced me to stammering idiocy.  Zi is a hardcore devotee of a particularly stream of theory, one which I would like to know better.  (And, judging by hir reactions to my dissertation, zi would also like me to know it better!)  I will spare you the details of our theory chat, except to note that, in hir inimitable fashion, zi managed to kinda-sorta imply that zi would not have allowed me to bring that draft to defense, had zi been my advisor.  (To which I just thought: Ooof!)  But, luckily for me, what's done is done, as Dr. Egojab -- I warned you all that I'm bad at pseudonym invention -- even acknowledged, adding that now I can focus on getting my theoretical knowledge up to speed so that I don't run into worse trouble down the line when I try to publish.

Zi also recommended, in the context of loading me up with theory works to hunt down and study, that I purchase an e-reader, so that I needn't shackle myself to 500 pounds of books when I depart for Research City.  I understand the philosophy of this, and I've even experienced first-hand the misery of shipping serious book poundage home from Research City.  (NB: never use Media Mail unless your boxes are packed as securely and firmly as Fort Knox containers.)  But, after poking around the internet a little, it seems to me that e-readers are a good idea in search of a reason to be.

Specifically, it seems that the big e-readers -- and, in this regard, the iPad is sort of a blinged-out member of the club -- all have various attractive features, but they're not books; they're just the empty containers into which books may be deposited.  And books, in paper or digital format, cost money.  It seems somewhat insulting to me that these companies would have us fork over hundreds of dollars that don't actually include any books I'd want to read.

To compound the insult, digital books look hardly any cheaper than their paper counterparts.  Wasn't part of the rationale of developing this technology that the digital stuff would be cheaper as well as more accessible?  And further compounding the insult -- Amazon may as well be cracking 'your momma' jokes now -- is that, unless you spend a minimum of $500 on an iPad, your e-reader will be a proprietary arm of the merchant that sold it, locked into whatever stock of digitized books that merchant happens to offer.  Postcolonialism and gender theory do not come cheap online, if they're offered as digital merchandise at all.  Social scientists -- and probably almost any kind of academic outside of lit people -- are kind of screwed if they hope to use an e-reader to read books for any serious professional purpose.

By the way, note that this is all a different story if your discipline ignores books in favor of journal articles.  If that's the case, then I would recommend you buy an iPad and rejoice, for lo, it doth enlarge PDF files easily and with great clarity of reproduction.  One of my friends at my school alma mater has an iPad, because 99% of the scholarly works he consults are journal articles that he downloads as PDFs; he speaks of his iPad in quasi-erotic terms of endearment.

I also read a lot of journal articles,  fact which, despite my distaste for the iPad, turns my head in that direction, but I read a fair number of full-length books too.  Hence my quandary.  From what I've gleaned so far, the marketing of this technology is still so hidebound that I may as well just stick with my computer as my e-reader.  Sure, scrolling through PDF pages with a mouse isn't as sexy as stroking a lascivious finger along a touch screen, but the hard drive capacity of my notebook dwarfs even a big iPad, and I'm not convinced that buying any kind of e-reader will grant me any practical access that I don't already have.

So, does any of my readers have some first-hand knowledge of how to navigate these seas?  Have you bought an e-reader, and have you managed to use it fruitfully for work?  Have any hot tips on cheap downloads of recent scholarly works?