Long story short, I lost my printed library years back and have been building a new PDF elibrary using free google ebooks, archives.org free ebooks, the old Learned Pig site, purchases from various online sellers including Lybrary.com, llepub.com and others.

Now that flash drives have proven pretty dependable, and have gobs of memory, I have set up a little system to catalougue ebooks and videos. To read and study the videos I have a refurbished Acer Netbook I picked up on ebay for $130 and bought a 5 hour battery to use along with the 2 hour battery that came with the netbook. I still look forward to a really good PDF ereader someday.

Went on ebay and found a company in China that among its offerings were Five 4gb flash drives shipped for $25. They also had much larger storage capacity FD, but for the price this was what I was looking for. Being different colors for quick ID was a plus. Coins, Cards, Bizarre, General Magic and History. The other side is a mish mash of FD I've picked up. Good for holding scripts, publicity photos, scanned copies of reviews, spreadsheet for business and what ever other information I need about the management end of the business.

Most of the volumes I have collected are from the mid 19th to mid 20th century. Tarbell Original Course, Bobo, Downs, Annemann, and so on. Not to mention volumes of magic history that is a great read, if you could find a hard copy. In my opinion, there is more unmined nuggets of magic in these old books than the normal magician could use in a lifetime. All free for the studying. I also scan and save articles as PDFs when something strikes my interest. Videos are also close at hand and easy to find and playback while practicing. The ones I have purchased for download.

The case I found for a $1 at the thrift store, removed the guts and put in a thin piece of plastic to hold the elastic band. Just like the cartridge holders on a gun belt.

I do like the feel of a book, but this new age of digital information has opened up new opportunities for study that I did not have even 10 years ago. And for me, KNOWLEDGE is the thing. So time to embrace the new.

Thank you for looking.

Click here to view attached image.

That looks awesome. You must have some good computer chops!!!!

Thank you for the kind response.

Must admit I do not understand what "good computer chops" means. Would you please enlighten me?

Thank you.

I think it means computer skills

If you can I would backup that information to a CD or DVD media also. I did some research on archive media and if I remeber right they don't know how long those flash drives will last. It is always good to have you valuable data backed up.

-Max

Flash drives will quit without warning and are less dependable than a hard drive. I only use them to backup files from my hard drive. I use TeraCopy to make backup copies. It couldn't hurt to store a second set of backups, periodically, off-site.