It’s a paperless society they tell us! Everything is going to be electronic! And it’s with that philosophy we find ourselves in a world with E-books. E-books are very simply just an electronic version in various formats of an existing book or text.
One of the benefits we receive with this format is portability. I can carry one or two paper-backs with me pretty easily, but with a PDA I could have 20 with me. Another helpful feature would be the ability to do an electronic search for certain phrases or passages. Writing a report or helping your kids with one? Discussing or debating something on a book forum or with your book club? If you know what you are looking for, it’s much easier to find the exact part of the book you want to quote or discuss.
I love books though! Some of my fondest childhood memories are going to the library and digging into the racks to find the book I want or have yet to discover. Of climbing over countless tables and boxes of musty old books at the flea market looking for every “new” old sci-fi book they had. I don’t think E-books will ever replace the tactile feel and joy you get from reading a paper book. That smell of paper you get when curling up under a blanket on a cold winter day. But I still like and use E-books.
Brand new books are being published in this format all the time. Some books exclusively in this format. There are a few file types that e-book readers and publishers use the most.
- .txt – Simple text document. These can be opened with pretty much any computer with the default text editor.
- .rtf – Rich text format. This file type has some formatting to help make reading it easier on the eyes and more organized. You can read this on a program like Word or Word Pad or many others.
- .doc – This is the Microsoft Word format and you don’t see this as much as the other two, but it sometimes comes up.
- .html or htm – This is the format that your internet browser will read. They can be displayed in Internet Explorer or Firefox or whatever browser is your preference. If you save the html file to your computer, you don’t even need to be online to enjoy it!
- PDF – Portable Document Format – Our own Adam West has written a great article about PDFs that you can read right here.
You can read E-books on your desktop, a laptop, a PDA, or even some cell phones and mp3 players! It is all about preference. In the last few years electronic devices have become cheaper, more common and better suited for our needs and they will continue along this line of progression.
But let’s get to the point of this entry. Free stuff!!! I was very leery about spending any money, even if it was only a few dollars on my first E-book. I was unsure that I would be able to deal with that type of reading and I would miss the paper feel. I still read regular books but sometimes an E-book works out nicely.
I’m going to show you two free and legal sites to get a few E-books for fun and entertainment as well as giving yourself a chance to see if this is a format that will work for you.
Project Gutenberg is a website that has an extensive collection of over 17,000 free E-books. These are available to you because the copyright has expired in the United States. They are free domain. You will find many classics here. You never know, you may find that in the electronic format your kids will feel more “modern” in reading of the classics. You would probably want to go over the book selection with them to find something appropriate.
The Baen Free Library is an experiment by Baen Books. When much of the copy-righted world feels that it should use force and restrictions and enforcements to prevent piracy, Baen Books has decided to go the complete opposite route. They have offered up a selection of their books (at the authors’ request) for completely free download. Most of these sci-fi books have seen a rise in sales based partly on this move. Many people upon reading the first few chapters will say “Hey, that’s a good book, Ill pick up the paper back and read it on my couch” or something similar. It also generates word of mouth advertising. “Hey Bob, have you read this book? It’s so good!” If you like the genre, this is the type of reading format we dreamed about as little sci-fi nerds.
If you are reading on your desktop or even your laptop, be sure to check out my articles on the Ergonomics of your Monitor and a simple program from Microsoft to make text reading easier.
What’s everyone’s take on the E-book? Love ‘em? Hate ‘em? Not sure? Give it a try. These are free!