I've been going back and forth about whether I want an e-reader or not. This week I finally caved. ( gadgetry babble, with bonus rants about DRM )
The big reason I bought an ebook is to change my book buying habits a bit. I have enough income now that I ought to be reading the 50 books I most want to read in a year, not the 50 books I happen to find cheap or free. My plan is to create a proper, organized to-read list, and systematically acquire books from it to put on my new shiny reader. And carry it with me everywhere, and get it out to read for 5 minutes at the bus-stop or when the person I'm with gets up to go to the loo, like I used to do with paperbacks before I got my smart phone. But I'm having problems with carrying out this good resolution, so could use some pointers.
My Cool-ER supports pdf, HTML, plain text and rtf, and epub for DRM books via Adobe's Digital Editions thingy. But I don't quite know how to find ebooks in those formats. Lots of online shops seem to sell ebooks only to the US (would anyone be willing to "lend" me their US posting address so that I can buy the books? They are actually purely digital and don't need a shipping address at all, and I promise not to do anything to besmirch your good name.) Most websites I've looked at don't even say what formats they do supply, which is really unhelpful. Interead (the company who make the Cool-ER) does have a bookstore, but it's one of those stupid things with mostly self-published stuff, as they have some stupid idea that teh ebil publishing industry is all about turning away perfectly good authors and everybody should have the right to publish their works without having to get past any gatekeepers *eyeroll*. This attitude doesn't usually produce things I actually want to read! And a lot of sites seem to have gone down the Amazon route of only selling things specifically for their pet device. Even without that, I have this awful feeling that I'm going to have to put a different program on my computer for every different company I want to give money to, which I'll do, but I won't feel happy about it!
So, for those of you who read ebooks, can you point me to the sites you use to buy them? If you have any advice about *cough* format shifting (note: it's absolutely my intention to pay publishers the full market price for everything I want to read, even if I end up using grey channels to convert the texts to a format that my device can read and I can back up) I'd be glad to hear it. I'm happy to know about legitimate sources of free ebooks (which is to say, not those that offer bundles of thousands of pirated titles, or those that charge exorbitant prices for poorly OCR'd versions of stuff that's in the public domain anyway; I know about Project Gutenberg, of course.) Also, what gadgets do you use for downloading webpages for later offline reading? Do you know any good e-publishers who may sell stuff that never goes through a paper format, but who actually do some selecting, editing and proofreading before taking their cut? Or any authors who are selling their own works directly whom you'd recommend? Another part of my resolution is that I want to read more non-traditional formats, like poetry and comic books / anime, so recs appreciated.
In other news, today I saw a woman with לא נכשלת tattooed across her cleavage in large, blocky Hebrew letters. (I may have looked at her breasts a little longer than is polite, cos while I can read Hebrew, I am not quite fluent enough to read whole words at a glance.) I translated this, with some bemusement, as "she does not fall over"; Googling brings up a lot of technical help documents about what to do when Windows fails [to do whatever], but also several quotes about "love never fails". Perhaps she has "love" somewhere that isn't publicly visible, even on someone who's fairly skimpily dressed. People are strange, but in a good way.
The big reason I bought an ebook is to change my book buying habits a bit. I have enough income now that I ought to be reading the 50 books I most want to read in a year, not the 50 books I happen to find cheap or free. My plan is to create a proper, organized to-read list, and systematically acquire books from it to put on my new shiny reader. And carry it with me everywhere, and get it out to read for 5 minutes at the bus-stop or when the person I'm with gets up to go to the loo, like I used to do with paperbacks before I got my smart phone. But I'm having problems with carrying out this good resolution, so could use some pointers.
My Cool-ER supports pdf, HTML, plain text and rtf, and epub for DRM books via Adobe's Digital Editions thingy. But I don't quite know how to find ebooks in those formats. Lots of online shops seem to sell ebooks only to the US (would anyone be willing to "lend" me their US posting address so that I can buy the books? They are actually purely digital and don't need a shipping address at all, and I promise not to do anything to besmirch your good name.) Most websites I've looked at don't even say what formats they do supply, which is really unhelpful. Interead (the company who make the Cool-ER) does have a bookstore, but it's one of those stupid things with mostly self-published stuff, as they have some stupid idea that teh ebil publishing industry is all about turning away perfectly good authors and everybody should have the right to publish their works without having to get past any gatekeepers *eyeroll*. This attitude doesn't usually produce things I actually want to read! And a lot of sites seem to have gone down the Amazon route of only selling things specifically for their pet device. Even without that, I have this awful feeling that I'm going to have to put a different program on my computer for every different company I want to give money to, which I'll do, but I won't feel happy about it!
So, for those of you who read ebooks, can you point me to the sites you use to buy them? If you have any advice about *cough* format shifting (note: it's absolutely my intention to pay publishers the full market price for everything I want to read, even if I end up using grey channels to convert the texts to a format that my device can read and I can back up) I'd be glad to hear it. I'm happy to know about legitimate sources of free ebooks (which is to say, not those that offer bundles of thousands of pirated titles, or those that charge exorbitant prices for poorly OCR'd versions of stuff that's in the public domain anyway; I know about Project Gutenberg, of course.) Also, what gadgets do you use for downloading webpages for later offline reading? Do you know any good e-publishers who may sell stuff that never goes through a paper format, but who actually do some selecting, editing and proofreading before taking their cut? Or any authors who are selling their own works directly whom you'd recommend? Another part of my resolution is that I want to read more non-traditional formats, like poetry and comic books / anime, so recs appreciated.
In other news, today I saw a woman with לא נכשלת tattooed across her cleavage in large, blocky Hebrew letters. (I may have looked at her breasts a little longer than is polite, cos while I can read Hebrew, I am not quite fluent enough to read whole words at a glance.) I translated this, with some bemusement, as "she does not fall over"; Googling brings up a lot of technical help documents about what to do when Windows fails [to do whatever], but also several quotes about "love never fails". Perhaps she has "love" somewhere that isn't publicly visible, even on someone who's fairly skimpily dressed. People are strange, but in a good way.
