I saw in the news this morning that Amazon.com is selling more e-books than good, old fashioned paper books. While this could be seen as a leading indicator, the change is happening sooner than I would have expected. While there are a couple of these readers in the eye of the populace, there are actually quite a few kinds of eReaders out there….
I have been checking out the experience of reading books on a piece of hardware, and truthfully, I haven’t found too much to notice (for good or bad…). I have been checking out the iBook, Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and Stanza apps on my iPad, and the differences between them figure more in the books that they access than in anything worthwhile in the actual reading experience.
The Reading Experience- that was the thing which surprised me the most…in that it was so utterly prosaic and mundane. Even with the LCD (backlit) screen on the iPad, I haven’t run into anything which impacted my regular reading regimen. For me, it is now the fact that I can carry so many books (without the aching back) which figure into my daily perspectives about these eReaders.
I guess than since there must be quite a few new ‘eReaders’ out there (as I could surmise from the sales statistics from Amazon.com), there are a few things worthy of checking out. As I have already mentioned, I have an iPad which allows me to use a number of different reader apps. This can lead to confusion in that they all have different file formats and many, meaning that you can’t easily transfer books from one to the other.
If you have been collecting large files (equivalent to books) in any format (HTML, Mobi, EPUB, PDF, etc.), there is something for Windows users to use to translate all of these different file formats into something that iBooks and Stanza can use (at least…),Calibre. This is a free program which translates, and collates all of your eBooks. This program even works as a wireless server to load EPUB books into the Stanza app (wirelessly to my iPad!).
From my bittorrenting days (when I had a lot of bandwidth…) I collected a large number of ‘books’ in PDF format. With Calibre, I have quite easily transformed many of them into formats which allow me to use them in iBook. As far as finding free books online go, there are quite a few worthwhile contenders out there, including sites like: PDFgeni, Project Gutenberg, and if you merely search for ‘free ebooks’ you should be able to find many more…
