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Try fictionwise for pdf versions of (some) books: http://www.fictionwise.com/, and select "multiformat". I've bought a lot of books through there.

You assume DRM is necessary, but in actuality, it isn't. These people somehow make a profit without DRM (otherwise they wouldn't bother releasing the e-books). As does these people as well as these people.

Perhaps multi-million dollar movies aren't capable without DRM or Britney Spears being profitable without DRM, but the truth is that the big media cartels aren't the only people in town no matter how much they want you to think they are. And DRM isn't necessary for artists to not only make a profit, but to make a living. Not all artists will be able to make a profit or a living, but then again not all artists deserve a profit or a living. DRM isn't a necessary evil, it's just an evil.

here's the beginning, taken from:
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook918.htm

With hindsight, I can date the beginning of my involvement in the Ancestor Wars precisely: Saturday, June 2, 2007. That was the night Lena dragged me along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped. We'd been out to dinner, it was almost midnight, but the sequencing bureau was open 24 hours.

"Don't you want to discover your place in the human family?" she asked, fixing her green eyes on me, smiling but earnest. "Don't you want to find out exactly where you belong on the Great Tree?"

The honest answer would have been: What sane person could possibly care? We'd only known each other for five or six weeks, though; I wasn't yet comfortable enough with our relationship to be so blunt.

"It's very late," I said cautiously. "And you know I have to work tomorrow." I was still fighting my way up through post-doctoral qualifications in physics, supporting myself by tutoring undergraduates and doing all the tedious menial tasks which tenured academics demanded of their slaves. Lena was a communications engineer--and at 25, the same age as I was, she'd had real paid jobs for almost four years.

"You always have to work. Come on, Paul! It'll take fifteen minutes."

Arguing the point would have taken twice as long. So I told myself that it could do no harm, and I followed her north through the gleaming city streets.

It was a mild winter night; the rain had stopped, the air was still. The Children owned a sleek, imposing building in the heart of Sydney, prime real estate, an ostentatious display of the movement's wealth. ONE WORLD, ONE FAMILY proclaimed the luminous sign above the entrance. There were bureaus in over a hundred cities (although Eve took on various "culturally appropriate" names in different places, from Sakti in parts of India, to Ele'ele in Samoa) and I'd heard that the Children were working on street-corner vending-machine sequencers, to recruit members even more widely.

In the foyer, a holographic bust of Mitochondrial Eve herself, mounted on a marble pedestal, gazed proudly over our heads. The artist had rendered our hypothetical ten-thousand-times-great grandmother as a strikingly beautiful woman. A subjective judgment, certainly--but her lean, symmetrical features, her radiant health, her purposeful stare, didn't really strike me as amenable to subtleties of interpretation. The esthetic buttons being pushed were labeled, unmistakably: warrior, queen, goddess. And I had to admit that I felt a certain bizarre, involuntary swelling of pride at the sight of her ... as if her regal bearing and fierce eyes somehow "ennobled" me and all her descendants ... as if the "character" of the entire species, our potential for virtue, somehow depended on having at least one ancestor who could have starred in a Leni Riefenstahl documentary.

Well worth reading, along with the rest of the stories in the collection "Luminous" by Greg Egan. here's another link to some favourable reviews of his stuff: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/books/e/eg an.htm

eBooks...

Microsoft Reader was one of the things that Microsoft was hyping to us Palm users as a killer feature of the Pocket PC over the Palm.

The problem was that the DRM in Microsoft Reader was really annoying, and the user interface was trying to emulate a paper book on a tiny screen.

And where there are DRM-protected and unprotected versions of the same books, the unprotected ones cost under $5 and the protected ones cost around $20. It makes the choice really easy...

http://fictionwise.com/

http://webscriptions.net/

Oh, and I'm using PalmOS to read my eBooks these days. :)

If you mean: what's stopping me from reading books on my handheld (a Psion 5mx), then the answer's absolutely nothing: I have a large library (about three bookcases' worth, in the open Palm Doc format), and read more on screen than on paper. I find it really convenient: my Psion's always with me, so I don't have to worry about leaving books around, and I don't have to bother with bookmarks. The backlight means I can read in bed with the lights out! And while the screen's not perfect, I still find it comfortable enough to read from -- after all, once you get engrossed in a story, you're not so aware of the screen anyway.

However, if you mean: what's stopping me from buying gadgets specifically designed as e-books, then I share the same concerns as anyone else: the hassle of carrying around another gadget, especially one that doesn't do much else; the inability to get the books I want on it; the inability to use open-format books; the difficulty of transferring stuff to/from it; and of course the expense.

And if you mean: what's stopping me from buying texts online, then that's a two-parter. Fictionwise sells lots of good stuff at fairly reasonable prices; the latest big-name stuff is only available in encrypted formats (MS Reader, Adobe Reader, etc.), but the other half is available in open formats (PDF, Palm Doc, etc.). Needless to say, I only buy the latter! (Partly because there is no MS Reader or Adobe Reader app for the 5mx, but also on principle. I like to edit my texts -- fix the formatting, use British English spelling, use curly quotes, etc, -- and I can only do that if the format's open.) Of course, I don't buy all my texts; many are from free sites, or various other sources.

So no, nothing's holding me back; though wider support for non-dedicated gadgets, and greater availability of texts in open formats would certainly help. Does that answer the question? :)

I have no problem with purchasing ebooks, and do this all the time from either Fictionwise or eReader to read on my Palm Zire (yes, the older one), which I upgraded to 8 MB. And I use to read many hours on it without any problem.

Before I began reading ebooks I did some research and found eReader's DRM scheme to be very nice, unlike others. The ebook comes encrypted with your name and the number of the credit card you used to purchase it as the decryption key. In other words, the ebook isn't device-locked, so I can open it in any Windows, Mac, Palm, Pocket PC and/or Symbian machine (no Linux version so far) I have access to. Also, the standard versions of the reader software are freeware, and the purchaseable Pro ones also aren't device-locked, so I install and reinstall them anywhere. Thus, so far I've purchase both Windows and Palm eReader Pro. And the Fictionwise store has the advantage of also having DRM-free copyrighted ebooks. These don't come nicely formatted as the DRM'ed ones, but they are as readable as any Project Gutenberg text file, so no big deal there.

However, the main advantage I see on ebooks is that they're much cheaper to purchase than printed versions, at least for me who don't live in USA. The shipping charges practiced on online stores such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble to send printed books to Brazil are outrageous, while on ebooks they're $0.

All in all, my ebook reading experience, with both DRM'ed, DRM-free copyrighted and public domain ebooks, has been almost excelent. I've around 200 ebooks and will keep purchasing them no matter what. :)

Take a look at Fictionwise. They have a very good selection, much of which (though not all) is avalible in multiple DRM-free formats. They also let you redownload files if you lose them for any reason. (Though if you bought a 'secure' file you can't change DRM schemes on a file. Other files you can switch formats with impunity.)

I make a point never to buy anything that's got DRM from them, but I still am able to get loads of books and stories from them.

At the moment they've got the Nebula award nominees for free...

I do most of my reading on my Clie at this point, with books from Fictionwise and Baen. (And some from the Gutenburg project.)

Not all content providers fight with their customers. Frankly, I think it shows which content providers are worth supporting and which aren't.

For the majority of cases this isn't true. I buy from two stores, Ereader because I like their format and find their DRM non-intrusive nor limiting.

Your ereader link is broken - try ereader.com :).

EReader is a pretty decent option for ebooks - mainly because the DRM isn't painful, but also because they have a not-too-pathetic range and the prices aren't too unreasonable. But the extra trick you need to keep in mind is to subscribe to their emailed newsletter (every week or so). This always includes a "10% off all purchases" code - so effectively anyone using them gets at least 10% off the listed price on any purchase. This may even be a sneaky back way around publisher "list price" demands. If so, I strongly approve. :)

The downside, for me at least, is that (last I checked) the Windows version of their reader program doesn't work under Wine. Annoying, but I do most of my reading on my Palm, and it works fine on that.

However, now I've said all that, I've found that Fictionwise, as you mentioned, seems to offer a better range at a better price with more formats. I approve even more. Thanks for the tip.

Unfortunately with most ebook sellers pricing themselves higher than equivalent paperbacks

For the majority of cases this isn't true. I buy from two stores, Ereader because I like their format and find their DRM non-intrusive nor limiting.

The other store which will appeal to slashdotters is Fictionwise. Both stores sell books for a comparable price to Amazon. such as The Footprints of God which is cheaper at Ereader. Another example is Blindfold for $8 from Fictionwise or second hand at Amazon. I know which I'd prefer ;)

Having said that, you won't save much money, if anything, buying e-books (I've found Australians will actually save some money though, because our prices are dearer, even once you take exchange rate into account). I still prefer the e-books because I'm running out of room in my house for dead tree books. I'm leaving the rest of the room to comic book collections and books not available electronically (although more and more books are being made available, such as Anne McCaffrey's books).

Having said that, inertia does appear to sometimes cause e-books to be priced dearer for a while longer then the paperbacks. An example is Robert J Sawyer's Hybrids which was kept at the hardcover price for a while after the paperback was released. But it has now finally come down in price. So if you're patient, you will get good prices for your e-books.

Unfortunately with most ebook sellers pricing themselves higher than equivalent paperbacks

For the majority of cases this isn't true. I buy from two stores, Ereader because I like their format and find their DRM non-intrusive nor limiting.

The other store which will appeal to slashdotters is Fictionwise. Both stores sell books for a comparable price to Amazon. such as The Footprints of God which is cheaper at Ereader. Another example is Blindfold for $8 from Fictionwise or second hand at Amazon. I know which I'd prefer ;)

Having said that, you won't save much money, if anything, buying e-books (I've found Australians will actually save some money though, because our prices are dearer, even once you take exchange rate into account). I still prefer the e-books because I'm running out of room in my house for dead tree books. I'm leaving the rest of the room to comic book collections and books not available electronically (although more and more books are being made available, such as Anne McCaffrey's books).

Having said that, inertia does appear to sometimes cause e-books to be priced dearer for a while longer then the paperbacks. An example is Robert J Sawyer's Hybrids which was kept at the hardcover price for a while after the paperback was released. But it has now finally come down in price. So if you're patient, you will get good prices for your e-books.

Unfortunately with most ebook sellers pricing themselves higher than equivalent paperbacks

For the majority of cases this isn't true. I buy from two stores, Ereader because I like their format and find their DRM non-intrusive nor limiting.

The other store which will appeal to slashdotters is Fictionwise. Both stores sell books for a comparable price to Amazon. such as The Footprints of God which is cheaper at Ereader. Another example is Blindfold for $8 from Fictionwise or second hand at Amazon. I know which I'd prefer ;)

Having said that, you won't save much money, if anything, buying e-books (I've found Australians will actually save some money though, because our prices are dearer, even once you take exchange rate into account). I still prefer the e-books because I'm running out of room in my house for dead tree books. I'm leaving the rest of the room to comic book collections and books not available electronically (although more and more books are being made available, such as Anne McCaffrey's books).

Having said that, inertia does appear to sometimes cause e-books to be priced dearer for a while longer then the paperbacks. An example is Robert J Sawyer's Hybrids which was kept at the hardcover price for a while after the paperback was released. But it has now finally come down in price. So if you're patient, you will get good prices for your e-books.

They'd have me if it was possible to install other readers onto it (I don't want Sony to write the programs, just make it so other people CAN write the programs and the user can install them on the reader). Alternately I'd be more tempted if their format wasn't DRM'd (yup, non-DRM e-books do exist. One store that sells quite a bit from numerous prominent authors (such as Kevin J Andserson) is Fictionwise).

I'm a big time e-book reader and I'm migrating to an e-book only library (for new books anyway). If Sony has success, that's great. But I'm finding it doubtful that they will, because if someone like me isn't interested, what is their demographic?

BUT THEY CROSSED THE LINE, if people start disrespecting the whole mess, the content providers have nobody but themselves to blame.

Damon Knight already predicted universal access to the cameras in his short story I See You.

Available as an ebook at the hyperlink. Good read.

Actually, I put 1-1.5GB XviD-compressed full DVDs on my Microdrive. I usually compress to a resolution of 704 pixels wide, and the Axim is able to downscale it to 640 just fine using Beta Player. It was a daily habit of mine a while back to take a DVD backup to keep me occupied on the subway (now ebooks do that job).

Microdrive was the best thing I bought for it. I also have a 512MB SD card in there, but I use it for applications (documents and files go on the MD).

To blur the iPod functionality lines a bit further, I could try this - although Windows Media Player is hardly my most used app.

There's been lots of mp3 Audiobooks.

Fictionwise has been selling mp3 audiobooks for at least a year, maybe two.

Baen has been selling mp3 audiobooks and including them for free on CDs included in some volumes for about as long.

Why can't the beacon devices themselves use this method to locate themselves relative to each other? Add a protocol for exchanging this information, and whatever devices are in the neighborhood could quickly reach a consensus as to their relative positions. And if one or more of them are GPS-enabled, voila, we have automagical mapping.

This idea was used in at least one Vernor Vinge story, "Fast Times at Fairmont High". The protagonists dropped wireless routers as "breadcrumbs" and after about four were down, they could accurately identify their position (relative to the routers).

Jerry Oltion wrote in his short story -
"The Best Laid Plans", Analog SF September 2005
who:
http://www.sff.net/people/J.Oltion/
where:
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook32371.htm

About humanity starting the terraforming of Mars, and......

Fictionwise also has a library which uses a similar technique to lend ebooks. its actually rather good though it doesnt have any good books as yet.

Good one. Now, for the 99% of the rest of the world who don't have a clue, see a description.

Actually, you are quite wrong there.

Ebooks are good for very specific niches, usually at the end of the usage spectrum.

At one end, we have reference books. Doctors LOVE the ebooks because they can put many of them onto a tiny device and have access to the information whenever, wherever without breaking their backs with paper equivalence.

On the other hand, you have read-once material. FictionWise seems to be making a nice business of it.

On the other hand DRM'd ebooks make it so annoying to read them, that the progress is slow.

I have failed to see the point of RSS.

I don't know what the "official point" of it is, but I have a great many uses for it. One main use I have is I have several feeds on my homepage and I can at a glance see if they've updated and/or see if I might be interested in their update.

Another use for it is to open up one program and it will tell me if any blogs I read (and there are many that I do) have updated since I last checked. Instead of having to open up over 20 pages (most of which remain unupdated for months at a time), I just open up "one page".

Another use is I keep track of new e-books on this site and I'll keep the items in my reader. Once a week or so, I go through all the items, delete most of them, keep the items for books that sound interesting*. That way whenever I want to buy a book, I can just open up my client and look through the items I've saved (which are obvious as they're unread).

* Actually I lie. I put the ones that sound interesting in a relational database. But you don't HAVE to do that, I'm just anal like that. Well, that and trying to keep track of my free e-books is very, very difficult.

Fictionwise sells ebooks, but they also have free novels, short stories and audio books from time to time. Currently they have 26 items available for free, including a lot of sci-fi.

Audible

Audible sells audio books, but they have some free items also. There is a new free item every week or so for subscribers.

ereader

ereader has a few free ebooks. During December last year, they had a different free ebook each day for a few weeks.

Audio Books for Free

AudioBooksForFree has free audio books, but in a very compressed format. You have to pay to get better quality, but for $100 you can buy everything.

Baen Books

Baen Books has a free library with sci-fi books.

Project Gutenberg

This one has been pointed out a few times, but it is the biggest. It is here and here. I think the first one is the official site.

you can't make money putting things in ASCII

Oh, I dunno. Fictionwise seems to be making good money from selling multiformat books, which are available in (amongst others) Palm DOC format, which can be converted to/from plain text.

Their prices seem quite reasonable, and I've bought quite a bit from them.

Till these damn things support PDF...

If it helps, Fictionwise sell all their non-encrypted e-books in PDF, and half a dozen other formats too.

With all the DRM on e-books, these days, the best reader is the one that reads your e-books.

My favourite is eReader because most of my books are from their site. They've got a reasonable range of books, including a few mass-market bestsellers. Their software supports Palm OS, Pocket PC, Win32 and Mac.

Another good site is Fictionwise, they sell a variety of books, some are DRM-free and come in a range of formats like PDF; some are encrypted and come in eReader or Microsoft Reader format.

Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because ... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...

First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.

The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.

One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.

Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time. :)

There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.

However, e-books as I use and love 'em are a very different beast. I have a large library (>100MB) of stuff in Palm DOC format -- an open format, easily convertible to/from plain text. (This means I can edit the texts as needed to fix formatting, errors, convert to British English spellings, &c.) I keep them on my Psion 5mx -- a PDA that I already carry in my pocket anyway. I read them on its 640x240 backlit LCD, which I find easy enough on my eyes. I get them from various sources; legit ones include Fictionwise, which has a reasonable range of DRM-free stuff, though the biggest names are DRM-only; author's web sites Gutenberg; Baen Books; and various others.

The advantages are numerous: I always have reading material, without having to carry a book around with me, so when I find myself sitting in trains or in the Chinese take-away, the time's never wasted. I always have reference material to refer to (dictionaries, 3 Bible translations, the Jargon File, you name it -- shortly to include a full cut of Wikipedia), and can quote straight from my favourite books. I don't need to faff around with bookmarks. I can read in bed with the lights out. I have backups. I don't need to buy any more bookcases (and I've got enough already...) And so on. I'm not saying this would be right for you; but it certainly works for people like the grandparent poster and me.

I can't agree with the quality presentation comments. To me its the data. I don't get stuck on the format of a book. Paperpack, hardcover, magazine, doesn't matter to me, its the "bits" of the content that is important.

I read e-books on my Treo. I have about 50, 10 or so are secure formats. Several are secure palm reader, several are secure mobipocket.

Using my Treo, I can read for 2 minutes waiting in line, in the dark on a plane, whatever. Its WAY more convenient than traditional media.

I'll want to make sure that in 10 years, I can still read it

I agree completely with this. To me it becomes a trust thing. I don't trust the system yet.

The site I usually buy ebooks from http://www.fictionwise.com/ provides me download service whenever I want, and continually maintains the keys with which I can download books in, allows me to infrequently change the keys for new books. I tend towards unencrypted books.

Here's are just a few trust/implementation problems

• Readers choose different mechanisms for deciding keys. Mobipocket on the Treo picks a new key based on device when REINSTALLED requiring re-download of books. That's just plain stupid.
• PalmReader decides they want to use my credit card. That's better, but I'll get a new credit card eventually. How about my SS number or better an ebook key that I choose, is public to them, and represents me and only me (i.e. others can gift ebooks, they can track piracy, its not personally identifying information used by anyone else). Win/win.
• If the website goes out of business I'm stuck with my current copy (encrypted as-is) of the books.

I love the format and convenience, but I'm thinking its getting close to the time that my fair use decryption of this stuff is going to have to kick in for me to guarantee that I retain the information I purchased.

If I could mod articles, I'd mod that one down. It seems like it was written a couple years ago. I started reading ebooks on my Palm III, now I've got a Samsung i700 and it's fantastic. I get my ebooks from www.fictionwise.com. They offer a huge selection and all that they can they have in multiple non-DRM formats. (So when I moved from Palm devices to PocketPC I just re-downloaded my library to .lit files - took 5 minutes.)

What is holding the eBooks back is that a new novel will generally have DRM and cost just as much as a hardback. So I get less versatility but have to pay more? So I don't buy the eBook, and I also don't buy the dead tree - there is more than I could ever read already in open formats.

If, like me, you read mostly sci-fi and classics (i.e. Project Gutenburg) then it's a great time for eBooks.

I've just joined allofmp3. You basically pay $0.01 per MB you download. (Aside: it's great! Pretty good range of stuff, great site, and you can choose the audio format and bitrate you want.)

I also buy the odd ebook &c from Fictionwise. Prices for short stories are only a few cents.

In both these cases, it's simply not feasible to pay for each purchase by VISA or whatever, so each one maintains an account for me; I can fill the balance on this account in large enough chunks via VISA or whatever, and can then use it to pay for music or books as necessary.

This is a workable solution; however, it's hassle for the web site keeping track of everyone's accounts &c, and it's hassle for me remembering that they hold a certain (small) amount of my money. It'd be much better all round if I could pay small amounts straight from my CC or whatever.

You can also find thousands of eBooks, no DRM, at:

http://www.fictionwise.com/

No relation, just a very satisfied customer. You can even get Asimov's and Analog magazines there; individual issues or subscriptions.

Display is 640x240, which is enough, and you can install any fonts you like. It's only greyscale, but as you say, that's fine for reading text. It does have a nice backlight, though, which is great for reading in bed!

It takes AAs instead of having an inbuilt rechargeable, but that's how I prefer it -- if you want to use rechargeables, you can use any form of AA rechargeable you like. You can use a standard power adapter too. And if you're away from wall sockets for any length of time, you can take spare AAs, or even buy them. I've had enough bad experiences with proprietary batteries running out away from home, that I value that! I generally get 10-20 hours' use, but then I'm a power user, and just reading books should give much more.

It also doesn't have USB, but that's not really a problem for me. My Mac has a CompactFlash reader, so I pop the CF out of the 5mx and into the reader, and it mounts as a drive on the desktop. Great for backups and file transfers. As to capacity, it has 16MB of built-in memory, but you can get CFs over 1GB now, and if you can fill that with text I'd like to see it.

And since the same few objections get posted every time someone mentions ebooks:

• No, no-one's claiming ebooks will replace paper completely.
• No, we don't care that you don't like them.
• Yes, we still like them anyway.

Oh, and while I'm here, a quick unsolicited plug for Fictionwise as a good place to get texts. It's a shame that most of their latest stuff is DRMed, but they have a lot of good unrestricted stuff too.

I'm not sure about the Retro nominees, but the regular Hugo niminees are almost always made available for free download at some time prior to the convention.

At the moment, I know that Best Novelette nominee "The Empire of Ice Cream" is available on-line; also, Kage Baker's novella The Empress of Mars appears to be available for free from Fictionwise. Don't know about the others, although, like I said, I'm sure they'll turn up eventually.

check out Fictionwise, they frequently have huge discounts (sometimes even free) on hugo and nebula nominees.

Maybe it's a "hotspot" of coming angel activity, as envisioned in Ted Chiang's Hell is an Absence of God (excerpt). Angels show up but in the process wreak all kind of physical havoc due to their immense power of the Divine Spirit. Cool story.

And let's not ignore the Babylon5 mythos, where angels are actually Vorlons (i.e., alien race).

I don't know how well Fictionwise are doing (they've been going quite a while and all the signs look good), but if more people put their money where their mouth is, maybe they'd be doing better still...

I have a little knowledge since I am trying to do something similar.

IMO, use of the Gutenberg name is a no-no. Further, they are using Project Gutenberg material.

On the Gutenberg name, the original Project specifies that if you distribute for money, do not use Project Gutenberg in your promotional material. Even given the disclaimers in Gutenberg II, I think Project Gutenberg would have a ligit complaint.

On the material, it is obvious that some Gutenberg 2 material comes from the Project Gutenberg archives. So I do not know what used no content from Project Gutenberg means, quoting from their web site. But I do the same thing at Fircrest Bookstore. My understanding is the Project Gutenberg wants 20% of my profits, and I would suppose Gutenberg 2 would honor that request, although it may not be enforceable.

Note that Fictionwise also sells PDFs of among other things, Project Gutenberg material. My little site is a reaction to the poor quality of some of the material there. I am experimenting with micropay systems and the possibility of doing machine generated "good" html, with live links to the footnotes and between the texts.

I think in the end people might want to evaluate both on price and how good the presentation is, assuming the legals are okay.

Project Gutenberg is free, but ascii text is not very nice. Fictionwise is relatively expensive, almost $4 each for Project Gutenberg material I am interested in, and the formatting is bad. Gutenberg 2 at $8.95 a year is really inexpensive, and the formatting is better than Fictionwise, but not quite perfect. All in all, I would consider the formatting acceptable. My little site has a sort of arbitrary $.25 micropay fee, but the html is a little better in layout and I use links extensively. My site will probably never be commercially successful, give the good enough aspects of Gutenberg 2.

The innovation of Gutenberg 2, IMO, is the emphasis of the read aloud capability of the format. This fits in well with their literacy orientation. I need to try them and see how that and their dictionary lookup work.

In my product, I started on the Richard Burton collection of The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, because it was hard to do what I wanted with this. I think it is useful to note that there have been comments in other venues that this set of books is difficult to read because the words are often unfamiliar to people. So the dictionary aspect is a positive.

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported--hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.

When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that, once again, AM had duped us, had had its fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.

Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future. "Oh God," he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn't move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. "Why doesn't it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don't know how much longer I can go on like this."

It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported--hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.

When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that, once again, AM had duped us, had had its fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.

Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future. "Oh God," he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn't move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. "Why doesn't it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don't know how much longer I can go on like this."

It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.

It's worth noting that there's an eBook version of this on Fictionwise. For those of you who complain about it not being available in an open format, I'll point out that Secure Microsoft Reader format is just as insecure as ever :)

• Ebook hardware is crap. The screen is to small, &c &c.
• EBook files are far too restricted -- I don't want to lose all my books when I upgrade to a new machine or reader.
• EBooks are far too expensive.
• You can't fold down the page corners on an ebook.

• No-one would ever read an entire book on screen. Paper is much easier on the eye.
• There's nothing like being able to pick up a book and hold it.
• You can't give ebooks as presents.

In short, almost all the objections people are making are valid but limited -- to certain types of people, and/or current technology. I doubt ebooks will replace dead-tree books in the foreseeable future, but there's no reason why they may not provide a popular alternative.

Personally, I've read far more on the screen of my Psion than I have on paper for the last few years; my library is over 80MB of compressed text. I always have something to read, wherever I am, and I can edit things as I wish (e.g. converting to British English spelling). The only place where paper is still better for me is on the loo; elsewhere, ebooks are more useful -- especially for reading in bed, where the backlight lets me read in the dark!

Thank you! ACs aren't completely worthless after all. :)

Here it is for the rest of you lot.

There is already Fictionwise and Baen Books, where I have bought oodles of DRM-free e-books, and now pepole in the music industry are joining in.

Bravo! The clue is spreading!

Look at the recent Mars flop, where they can't get contact with the probe. Anything similar with a crew onboard would be fatal.

Fictionwise also sell a lot of stuff in open formats (not actually ASCII, but PDB for one can be directly converted to/from ASCII). Unfortunately, they also sell in restricted formats, and most of their big name material falls into the latter category. But there's still a lot of good stuff in open formats, so kudos to them for that.

Since I've got into some of the newer PDAs with high-res screens (I've got an iPAQ and a couple Clies), I've found reading them to be just as easy as a physical book - and in difficult lighting conditions, even easier. The convenience of having several novels for travel without having to pack (I'm a quick reader) is fantastic. Mostly I use the Microsoft Reader; I can annotate, high-light, add comments, etc. quite easily. The electronic format is also handy for searches. So, for me, newer technology has solved the "ease of use" issues I had in the past.

But the format wars are making it difficult. Mostly I get my eBooks from www.fictionwise.com. They have their books in as many formats as the individual publishers will allow, which helps - but a lot of the newer stuff is in the secure, proprietary formats; so I can either get a Palm format or a PocketPC format but not both. This is a pain, but not deal-breaker for me. More painful is wondering if I'll be able to read them again 10 years from now.

But anyway, even with those concerns, I've become addicted to the "ease of use" of current eBooks and readers and I can't go back! A more standard format would encourage me to spend more on eBooks.

Well, at least it didn't melt half the Earth (or this version).

Just browse through Amazon, you'll see they have a lot of ebooks already available. They're a tad more expensive than Fictionwise or EBooks.com, and I wish you had access to the book indefinitely instead of only 30 days, but they're still doing a lot of good to the ebook world.

As a matter of fact, when I considered buying a PDA because it was just too damn expensive for me to order real books to Shanghai, the availability of ebooks on Amazon convinced me it was the right thing to do.