The Sunday Salon - eReaders for Canadians, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo movie

My husband and I had a hectic day yesterday. We sat with our accountant to discuss our taxes and afterwards talked about what we wanted to do with our tax refunds. Hubby wants to get some stuff for the house, and a new laptop to replace his ancient one, and I'm looking at jumping into the eReader foray since there are so many options available now for Canadians to choose from: Sony's eReader, the Kobo, the Kindle, and the iPad. I've been doing research on all four this weekend to try to figure out which one would be a good match for me. I like the wireless on the Kindle, and when I did a random search for some recent physical books I've bought, Kindle's store had all the matching eBooks. The Kobo is coming out in May and is much cheaper ($150), comes pre-loaded with 100 public domain titles, but forces you to upload via a USB or Bluetooth, and I could hardly find any of the eBook versions of my recently purchased books on Kobo's store. The iPad is expensive (cheapest model is $500) and since the iBooks app is only available for the iPad (which isn't being sold in Canada yet), it's hard to get an idea of the availability of certain titles. Sony's eReader costs less than the Kindle but more than the Kobo (around $200), and even though it comes in a really cute rose colour you can only upload via USB, however, the Sony eBook store's selection is better than Kobo (but not as good as Kindle's).

So I'm stuck. I would love an iPad but that's way too much of an investment to make when I already have a perfectly good MacBook, so a cheaper device that is only an eReader would be more practical. Kindle would be my first choice given the wireless downloading and the amazing selection form the Kindle store. The only thing that bugs me about the Kindle is the non-standard format that it sells its eBooks in, meaning that I can't transfer those eBooks to a new device down the road (unless it's another device Amazon decides to make). Sony would be my second choice due to the colour of the device (I'm a sucker for girly colours), as well as the selection of the store. Sadly, though Kobo is Canadian and cheap and comes pre-loaded with 100 titles already, unless I can get the books I want to read in an eBook format, what's the point of getting an eReader? The Kobo store doesn't even have The Hunger Games, which the other two stores do have, how can you call yourself a bookstore of any kind and not stock The Hunger Games, seriously. But since both stores use the ePub format, hopefully that means I can buy from the Sony store and use the Kobo device, I'll have to see.

After our business with the accountant, we went to Mississauga to go see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the original Swedish version with subtitles. The only other theatre showing it was in Toronto, so we took Mississauga instead. The movie was long, almost 3 hours, but so worth it. The movie does leave out a lot of information that the book delves into, such as the mental health system in Sweden that Lisbeth's involved in and Mikael's whole early involvement with the Wenerstrom case, but no to the point where it's detrimental to the plot. My husband hasn't read the book yet, but he could follow along with the plot just fine. The actors that played Mikael and Lisbeth were perfect, they got the personalities just right. Now if only I could find a way to import the dvd...