Carl
Thanks for the very informative introduction in a nut shell to ebooks, you
have me sold.
Greg
From: Carl Clifford
Sent: Monday, 19 December 2011 9:18 PM
To: Greg Little
Cc: 'Peter Shute';
Subject: eBook Management Program
Greg,
It seems that ebooks will be a major path for publishers in the future.
Unfortunately there are some 30 ebook formats available (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_readers ) fortunately,
most handle the .epub and .pdf formats. All the file formats can be stored
on a hard drive and loaded onto your ereader as required, though most
readers have a pretty good capacity. The reader I use, Kobo Touch, can hold
some 1,000 books as is and if you use a memory card, up to 10,000 titles.
Ebook files are as portable as any other digital file and can be emailed,
carried in a thumb drive or burnt to disk.
The price of ebooks varies a great deal. I have seen some which are cheaper
than a hard copy and some which are dearer than buying the same title from
vendors such as Fishpond or Book Depository. The great advantage of ebooks
is that there are so many free titles. I reckon I could keep myself in
reading material for life, just by reading free titles. My education was
quite lacking when it came to the classics. Now that I can obtain them for
free, I intend to remedy that.
One of the great things about ebooks is that there are so many out of print
titles and obscure titles becoming available on free sites such as the
Gutenberg Project. This will be a boon for researchers relying on
inter-library loans, as many libraries, including the National Library of
Australia, are beginning to offer their holdings in ebook format.
With Sony announcing their developing a "roll-up" TV, I think that we will
see some interesting developments in the near future for ebooks. Ebook
readers have far less circuitry than a TV, so the future looks very
interesting for ebooks.
Hope this answers your questions. I am by no means an expert on the subject,
having only taken delivery of my Kobo at the end of November, but I surely
like the idea.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
On 19/12/2011, at 7:36 PM, Greg Little wrote:
Carl
Can you please enlighten on how these ebooks work. They sound interesting
but I have concerns. I am unlikely to buy an ereader of some sort if the
ebooks are only marginally cheaper than or as expensive as a hard copy and
if the ebooks cannot be stored safely somewhere on a hard drive, separate
from the ereader. Can people move them around as a simple file, swap them
etc by email?
Greg Little
-----Original Message-----
From:
On Behalf Of Carl Clifford
Sent: Monday, 19 December 2011 7:17 PM
To: Peter Shute
Cc:
Subject: eBook Management Program
Peter, unfortunately I have not kept a list. Here are a few sites that
offer free ebooks http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en
http://www.digitalbookindex.com
http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.mobileread.com/ This list
of sites is by no means complete, I am finding new sites all the time.
In the few weeks I have had my ereader, I have been more involved in
an orgy of science fiction. Baen books, one of the main SF publishers
has a great library of free books, and I have been working on
downloading most of their free library.
There is an rapidly growing number of sites offering so many books
(Project Gutenberg alone has some 36,000 titles) that finding what
interests you entails a fair bit of dredging.
Have fun dredging.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
On 19/12/2011, at 6:13 PM, Peter Shute wrote:
Carl, any chance of a list of bird related eBooks you've found that
are free or cheap?
Peter Shute
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