http://www.switched.com/2010/08/30/the-best-e-readers-compared-kindle-kobo-nook-and-reader-throw/
Tom Colvin ´s last blog ..Kobo E-Reader Expands Its Scope

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by tomcolvin, Tomcat Colvin. Tomcat Colvin said: My most significant discovery for writers in my 4 yrs of blogging just posted. Time sensitive. http://bit.ly/bQXpKV [...]

Would you be willing to write a guest review for posting here so that others will learn about these programs?

Tom
Tom Colvin´s last blog ..Publish For Tablets With New Adobe Software – New addition to Adobe Creative Suite

http://yourothermind.com/keeper/

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/

I’ve downloaded both but no opinions so far; it always takes me a while to sift through all the features ‘fore I can tell if something’s useful or not…

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by L Scott Clark, Laura Jill, Kafele Walker, Cameron Mathews, Nicolaas and others. Nicolaas said: The beginning of the end? RT @AdviceToWriters: E-Books Surge Past Hardcovers at Amazon: http://bit.ly/ct2bbP [...]

I used to work in our local university library with my laptop, but I ran into this stupid problem every time I had to go to the john. The library had signs up everywhere warning people not to leave their laptops, etc., unattended because they’d had a lot of thefts, so I had to either pack the thing up again when I needed to go to the bathroom or leave it in the study room or wherever I was working and trust to luck. Needless to say, shutting the thing down, packing it up, then setting it up again every time I had to go to the bathroom was a fantastic waste of time. From now on, I’ll either use my Alphasmart when I go to the library or just write longhand. Laptops are lighter than an Olympia SG-1, for sure, but Neos are lighter and more mobile than laptops and a notebook is even more mobile. This search for the ultimate convenient writing tool goes on and as a result I’ve accumulated almost every type imaginable.

Most of the time, I just work at home. If I’m driving around, I dictate into my voice recorder and transcribe it later. At the moment, I’ve got a fantastic old rolltop desk for my typewriter and really enjoy working on it. One advantage to working on a typewriter (for me) is that it makes it more difficult to rewrite constantly as I go along–one of my major problems. Also, there are too many instantly-available distractions on a laptop. YouTube, for instance, is a massive time suck. I’ll be writing and get stuck on a section and the next thing I know I’m watching people fall down the stairs on Fail Blog or a video of somebody’s cat attacking their poodle. It’s insanity, but I can’t seem to help myself.

Speaking of word processors, though, I’ve found that most of them are more or less interchangeable. The critical test for me is how easy it is to set up headers. Some word processors handle this better than others, but none of them handle it very well, if you ask me. In standard manuscript format you need a header with the title, your name and the current page number, but you don’t want the header to appear on the title page. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted trying to get this set up correctly even in Word. Most of the major word processors are reasonably stable (at least when you’re dealing with simple fiction manuscripts), so I guess it all boils down to price in the end. Just going by price, I would probably settle on Word Perfect over Word, but since I already have Word, price isn’t really an issue any more. I’m still trying to figure out why RagWriter made the Top Ten list. The thing costs $695 (!!!) and sounds like it doesn’t do half the things any normal word processor can do. Why would anybody pay $695 for a word processor? I guess they’re aiming for a specialized corporate market, but it doesn’t sound like RagWriter would handle most business applications very well, either. Go figure.