What Would Jane Treo?

[From Maggie Sullivan] I'm a big fan of the author Jane Austen, who lived and wrote two hundred years ago, but I have found that love of Jane and my Treo are not mutually exclusive.

One of the first things I did when I received my brand-new Treo 680 was download e-books of Jane Austen's six major novels so I would always have them with me. This came in handy at my book group meeting last week, when one of our members had difficulty locating a passage that he wished to quote from his paperback copy of Austen's novel Emma. I fired up my Treo, opened Emma in eReader, searched the text for one of the words in the quotation, and found it within a few seconds. The person who was looking for the quotation was fascinated, and after the main discussion was over, I showed him eReader and gave him a demonstration of searching the text, which he thought was fantastic (as well as the fact that I had the text of all six books in my tiny Treo).

On the way home, I let my companions hear a little bit of an audiobook of Emma that I had on the expansion card. The audiobook is read by Jeremy Northam, who portrayed the hero of the novel in the film adaptation, and my friends were suitably jealous when i told them "Mr. Knightley" had been reading to me on my train commute all week.

I have just begun to use my Treo to moblog, particularly to AustenBlog, my blog about all things Jane. And of course I have Jane as my wallpaper!