Slashdot Mirror

Probably the first men in the moon will be McDonalds, for their new McMooncalf burger.

_No_ you don't; you just think you do.

Background.

Forground.

The Machine Stops is also my first thought. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops http://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.html

In the same manner that oak barrels inject other hydrocarbons into scotch. Benzene in trace amounts might make the beer tastier. Umm, benzene.

There may be some minor differences in the physiological effects of different hydrocarbons. /sarcasm

In the splendid Police Your Planet by Lester Del Rey people spend a lot of time drinking :"needled beer" - beer with added ether.

Nice.

Its a 'scratch monkey'

I'd never heard that term until I read Stross' free ebook by the same name and Googled it.

Been there, done that:

manybooks.net/titles/berrymanj3067930679.html

Can anyone say 'exocortex'? The only thing missing are the right apps and software stack.

accelerando
http://manybooks.net/titles/strosscother05accelerando-txt.html

A couple of good places to get free ebooks are:

• Project Gutenberg
• Manybooks.net (which for some reason isn't working at the time of this writing!)

There are quite a few others, but many of these sites share 90% of the same content anyhow. I've got a Kindle and greatly enjoy it, but like many of the other readers here, I balk at the ridiculous prices for ebooks (wow, a dollar off the electronic edition!!). There's a great backlog of classics out there that are freely available, so I'm not really wanting for leisure reading content. I guess I'll just have to wait for Going Rogue to go public domain!

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-6-sites-to-get-free-ebooks/
which has links for several others, including:

http://www.manybooks.net/
http://www.feedbooks.com/
http://www.booksinmyphone.com/

http://manybooks.net/ and http://feedbooks.com/ are also excellent sources of free ebooks, providing published, unpublished and public domain titles.

FWIW, personally I abhor ads and would seek to locate an ad-free copy of a given book before purchasing an ad-embedded copy.

irc://us.undernet.org/#bookz
'Nuff said.
I can search and download any book I want in an instant. Perhaps not the very latest bestsellers, but everything else. And for classics/creative commons stuff, there's always Project Gutenberg, Manybooks and of course, Baen.
To me - these sites (and aforementioned IRC channel) are like an enormous virtual library. I'm a scifi/fantasy fan, and these books seldom are single stories- they tend to run into dozens or more books.
While enjoyable to read - I don't think I could ever go back to reading the whole thing from the beginning. Hence I've read Discworld, Stephen King's Dark Tower series, Star Wars' New Jedi Order, to name a few.
If I actually went and bought these books, I'd run out of space to keep 'em. But I can quite conveniently carry them on my hard drive, or read them on my phone with Mobipocket Reader, or on my dedicated ebook reader (Infibeam Pi, a rebadged ). No DRM, no remote control shenanigans by the manufacturer, no bullshit.
As far as I'm concerned, if downloading ebooks off an IRC channel or a torrent is piracy, then so is borrowing physical books from the local library. In neither case do the publishers get paid. Show me an ebookstore that charges a reasonable price (cheaper than the physical version for starters and adjusted to local market rates depending on country rather than just directly converted from USD), and has no DRM. Baen offer their books like this, it's a pity Amazon won't.

Are computers moral? Can they experience empathy (or rather, as in Asimov's laws, simply are coded to never hurt a human, whether indirectly or not)? How can we tell from the outside if a computer behaves normally or not?

That's a good point, but the big difference between a human and a computer is self motivation. Our current computers can be programed with the appearance of self motivation, but they lack real, self directed action. I suppose a virus has the beginnings of rudimentary self preservation and life, but that's more of a philosophical argument. Our computers may appear outwardly normal, but cannot act any more amorally or morally than their programers; they are just tools acting on behalf of their users. It's like questioning the morality, or amorality, of a gun or a car.

We can only hope that if we ever develop thinking machines that we treat them ethically, or through some magic make them truly Asimov 1.0 compliant. Ruddy Rucker wrote a strange and bawdy book, The Ware Tetralogy that explores this idea of constructed and enslaved life and its relation to humanity.

Pirate Bay is the best source for books? I don't think so. Project Gutenberg is the best source for books, unless you want technical manuals--then it depends upon what you need.

Mildly off-topic, but for Project Gutenberg books I'd greatly recommend ManyBooks.net, they have most of the PG books available in multiple formats (and I *do* mean multiple, check it out) and with user reviews to help you find the better ones.

This reminds me of a great short SF story by J.F. Bone: A Prize for Edie http://manybooks.net/pages/bonejf2633226332/0.html "The Committee had, unquestionably, made a mistake. There was no doubt that Edie had achieved the long-sought cancer cure ... but awarding the Nobel Prize was, nonetheless, a mistake ..."

Allot of the classic authors referred to are available for free online, here for instance: http://manybooks.net/collections/SciFi_post1950.php (1950 thru 1960) If some of the science fiction is a little too 'liberal' for prude parents then I'd suggest C.S. Lewis' Cosmic Trilogy which are a surprisingly good read and quite rare among the majority humanistic sci-fi authors. Along that vein, I'd suggest there is another genre that could be added here - Erotic Fantasy with Space Ships. Seems to me there are a remarkable amount of dirty old men who write science fiction to fantasise about a new society where women have conveniently loose morals. Personally I'm an Clarke fan.

It's not a textbook, and it's not meant to be. So why are you comparing the two?

Read Workaphobia's perceptive comment again because I think you missed the point and we might in fact agree. W's comment, along with Bradbury's opinion of the Internet, is what lead to the comparison of Wikipedia (a tiny subset of the Internet) with books (though not just textbooks).

You're succinctly correct, an encyclopedia is not a textbook (though I'd say Wikipedia, even with its shortcomings and sometimes biased articles and moderators, still beats many dead-tree encyclopedia articles written by biased editors and some textbook chapters in quite a few ways). The minor point was a comparison of reading for a length of time, and choosing between disjointed articles and a sustained-topic book--with which one do you learn more? This question, interesting as it is, is too broad to answer generally; unless you consider "sometimes one, sometimes the other" an answer.

The main point is the world needs curious-minded people whom pursue their interests in a variety of ways, including Internet haters (e.g. Mr. Bradbury, if he really is so) whom exclusively prefer libraries and books even though the Internet includes many books, and some who prefer the Internet, and some who prefer both. And to add another group, some use neither (I have a friend who refuses to read anything except what's required for work; and not unlike /., she can be interesting, insightful, and trollish).

but it can also appear as an USB key to a PC) and most important is very open: no DRM bullshit, it runs Linux

I have a first-gen Kindle, and I am quite satisfied with it. It runs Linux too. It's a USB storage device too. It reads non-DRM ebooks just fine. There is "DRM bullshit" if and only if you buy your books from Amazon, which is not a requirement.

I bought it to read books, not to try to get root on it. If getting root is really worth spending an extra $500, be my guest, but I'll keep my money and spend it on books.

All of the above is true. I picked one up (the Kindle 2) last Saturday. I love the thing and grabbed the handful of Amazon books that are $0.00 (some OK sci-fi ones.) But of more use were the freebies - ManyBooks, FeedBooks, and MobiPocket. A lot of the "classics" are there - the ones you always say you're going to read but never do. I've got a ton of them that I now have in a convenient storage medium (for me to still never actually read ;))

All of that said, I'm pissed that I just got the 2 and now the DX is announced so soon after. I'm a Mac fanboy so I'm used to that kind of thing happening, but ... The only reason I would consider returning the 2 and holding on the DX would be the native PDF support. I'm guessing that's a purely software-based feature (as well as the horizontal/vertical flipping) and hopefully it'll be an optional software upgrade down the line. Or if those things are important to me, should I send the 2 back, fork out the additional $100 and wait for the summer release?

Myth:

If you buy a Kindle, you are locked into Amazon's Kindle store.

Truth:

There are many sources for books that can be read on the Kindle.

Some Free Sites (Public Domain / Creative Commons)

MobileRead.com (look for .mobi books you can download to your computer or download the MobiGuide and get your books via Whispernet) Feedbooks.com (books can be downloaded to your computer or if you download their Kindle Guide you can get your books via Whispernet - they even have a video on how to use the guide) Manybooks.net (when you download to your computer, look for Kindle format or Mobipocket) 1001Books (download books to your computer or directly from your Kindle browser)

Some Pay Sites

Fictionwise.com (look for .mobi books but NOT Secure Mobipocket books) BooksonBoard.com (register your Kindle's PID and you can download any .mobi from their Overdrive servers - to learn more about this see the Visual Kindle Guide wiki) Baen.com (great site for Sci-Fi books which offers free as well as low cost books)

So your Kindle is still somewhat useful. I would hope that more competition arises and Amazon removes its Kindle services from its e-book services so as to avoid a nasty inevitable anti-trust suit.

manybooks

Pick a book. On the right side, you will find a button free download and some 500 formating choices (many custom, many gadget-specific).
PS I have no relation whatsoever with manybooks, but I was horrified that it took me so long to find them again at Google).

Yes, here comes a lazy, selfish, and mean-spirited comment.

I participated in the G1G1 program half for altruistic reasons and half for selfish reasons. (A perfect match for the program, right?) I thought that if nothing else, the XO would make a very satisfactory eBook reader for the wealth of public domain material available from Project Gutenberg.

As with so much about the XO, the hardware is great, and the software is flaky.

I don't see how the Read activity can be regarded as adequate for reading textbooks, at least not in its present form.

The "Read" activity is... unpredictable. It's not clear what file formats it's supposed to work with. The one that works most reliably is PDF. In particular, downloads from Manybooks.net, with translation format set to PDF, Large Print gives access to what seems to be most if not all of Project Gutenberg, with formatting that works quite well for the XO.

My first attempt at reading for pleasure from the XO went very well; the screen was legible, the package was portable, I enjoyed the story (L. Frank Baum, "The Master Key," a very entertaining read by the way).

Until I tried to continue reading a day later and found myself back at page 1, having lost my place.

When you go back in the Journal to a book you've been reading, sometimes it appears to reopen the book at the page where you closed it, and sometimes it loses your place and reopens at page 1. I haven't been able to characterize the behavior well enough to report it as a bug.

The "Keep" feature, which I would have expected to be the right way to save the state of the Read activity, always reports a "Keep error."

There is no way to bookmark a page, at least not one that I've been able to find.

The XO is not clever about the journal titles that it assigns to downloaded eBooks, nor does it attempt to automatically generate metadata for them, so they are hard to find in the Journal unless one goes in and manually enters things like title and author for every eBook.

The Read activity does not appear to have any way to suppress the display of the mouse pointer. Which on the XO is a bit on the big and intrusive side.

It seems to behave badly on long PDF documents. This, too, is hard to pin down, but any full-length novels... especially full-length Victorian novels... strain its capability.

Now, I'm sure someone will say "It's open source, so fix it." The honest response I'm too lazy and have other things to do with my spare time, but I will point out that the promise that you could directly view the source of any XO activity directly on the XO itself does not appear to be realized, at least not in the G1G1 as shipped. Nor is it at all clear to me that Pippy, which appears to be the development environment included, would be up to the task of modifying the Read actvity.

And a free edition is available, formatted for most any ebook reader you can think of (including Kindle and Sony reader.) Manybooks.net has all 16 volumes. Manybooks got them from Gutenberg.

The correct URL is http://manybooks.net/

Disclaimer - I bought a Kindle. Actually, it's sitting right next to me while I download or convert some books from http://manybooks.net./

I do a lot of traveling and invariably end up taking a paperback and hardback with me and have been looking at readers for some time. I was getting close to buying the Sony 505, and then read up on the Kindle. *For me*, it fits my needs.

Is there great stuff about the Kindle? Yeah! is there mediocre to bad stuff ($400 price)? Sure thing. But in the creature comfort/benefit analysis, it was a buy.

But I know where the article is coming from. The review page for the Kindle demonstrates some serious flaws in the Amazon rating system when it comes to controversial items. For the most part, the 1 star ratings (bad! bad! bad!) and the 5 star rating (good! good! good!) are about equal. It took some time to wade through the "reviews" before deciding to buy the unit.

Personally, I would like to see all the bad reviews written by people who have never even seen the unit but must side on the anti-DRM front removed. I'd also like to see the tit-for-tat 5 star ratings also removed.

And I thought us techno-geeks were rabid. Those bookish people have us beat!

+ Reader has to be under $100.

How about free? Provided, of course, that you provide your own Blackberry, Palm, Smarter-Than-Thou-Phone, PC or other geek-faux-wang. If you don't already have one you can probably find something acceptable at or near your $100 price point. It won't have the big e-Paper screen that the Kindle does, but I have no troubles using a smaller display.

* Books have to be half the price of print books or lower.

e-Book pricing is all over the place right now, with titles ranging anywhere from free, free, or free, all the way to about the same as printed books. As the market grows expect to see more pressure on prices which should force things down a bit, but don't hold your breath.

+ No bullshit DRM. I better be able to back the content up, copy it to my ipod, save it on my hard drive. Whatever.

Some books ship with bullshit included while others come pas-des-merde-des-vasche. With a good reader you can feed it anything from flat ASCII text, HTML or PDF files through to insanely encrypted tracts of bull and have something readable come out the other end. The choice is yours.

+ I better be able to resell it, just like I can resell a used book. Otherwise, all of this is just a run-around way for the publishing industry to attacked the used book trade, which they hate more than almost anything else on earth (including their loathing of public libraries).

Yes, you can absolutely resell the hardware that you read books on just like you resell a used book. Reselling _data_ is a trickier problem, as it is nothing like a used book. Besides, the only way for second hand ebooks to have any value would be if they included "Bullshit DRM". Which do you want, resale or steerpoopage?

There's already an ebook application (books.app) for the iPhone/iPod Touch and if you've used jailbreak, you probably already know about it.

In terms of how it looks, the text is incredibly smooth even at small sizes and using the touch interface makes it easy to move forward in the book. For someone who read a few books on my old Palm Vx, this is the perfect size and shape for a reader.

Books, including most of the Gutenberg collection, formatted specifically for the iPhone can already be found at manybooks.

And it includes a backlight. For me, one of the key advantages of an ebook is not worrying about the light source and therefore being able to read in places where the light isn't good or when the person next to you in bed is trying to sleep. I'll never understand why the various e-paper devices don't have some sort of integrated lighting.

Actually the Sony Reader does nicely render unDRM'ed PDFs and features good bookmarking! It's pretty neat. The DRM'ed books suck, of course, but I've never bought one. Guttenburg texts pre-formatted for it rock.

I'm the happy owner of one. After years spent looking at e-books and never finding one whose functionality/price was good enough, i almost found the holy grail. Battery life is brilliant, though something like 10 times less than advertised (i think they advertise 7500 page turns of autonomy, and my experience is that i can read books up to 800 pages on a full charge).

On DRM, the reader's best supported format is the sony one (.lrf files), which provides the best rendering, and which *can* support a DRM layer. It also happens to be a trivial format that also works without embedded restrictions. Therefore, you can download many books from the Gutenberg project in unencumbered lrf format from Manybooks.net. You can also convert many document formats (txt, rtf, html, doc) to unencumbered lrf. PDF support is not good though, as most A4 formatted pdfs will be too small when read in portrait, and will require you to scroll when in landscape. Good enough if you really need to access a pdf from time to time, but there's no way you'll ever read a book that way.

Finally, on accessing the device, mine doesn't work as a usb mass storage device, and i don't know if that's going to happen in the next models (sure hope so, obviously). However, there's a cross-platform open source driver available, which means that since i have the reader, i never had to use the crap software sony provides more than once, just to have a look. Never bothered again, and it doesn't run on my linux box anyway. That driver also comes with a GUI software, and many basic command line tools to access the device (cp, rm, ls etc), and to convert file formats (html2lrf being one of the most useful).

In the end, i really love that 'toy'. The hindrance of not having a backlight on the screen makes it more comfortable on the long run: no more visual fatigue than reading paper. The battery life is good, it is small enough to be carried comfortably (i'm looking at you iLiad), it can read most of the free books out there on the web. The main downside of course, is that you won't get access to the most recent books, as they're only sold with DRM, and usually not in Sony's format. Personally, i wasn't looking for that, so i'm fine, but this *is* a hindrance, and will be until ebook shops change their policies, which could take many years... Ah, and also, it's an ebook reader, nothing else. Well ok, it can display images and play mp3s, but that's really a waste of battery life. It doesn't browse the web, it has no wifi. It's only a book reader. But it's a damn good one.

I don't really understand why the Sony Reader isn't more popular. It's infinitely nicer reading text on the reader than it is trying to read it on a laptop. You can use the reader outside in direct sunlight and the screen is clearer than in dim lighting conditions. And unlike a paperback (otherwise the superior medium) you can carry thousands (literally) of texts in a pocket and still move.

I own one and use it constantly for reading project Gutenberg texts (pre rendered for the device and downloaded from http://www.mobileread.com/ and http://manybooks.net/ ). Like any early generation device, it has some rough spots, but none of them seem sufficient to explain its relative unpopularity.

For me it would attain perfection if O'Reilly integrated it with their Safari online technical catalogue so that I could replace my physical technical bookshelf (now approaching critical mass) with something a little more portable.

Take a click over to http://manybooks.net/categories/SFC - you can freely download (it's all in with the Gutenberg project) all KINDS of classic scientifiction that haven't had their copyrights renewed.

I prefer reading printed books but don't have room for very many on my bookshelf , so to save space, ebooks are a good alternative. I have sometimes had to throw out old books to make room for new ones. Of course, I always felt guilty doing that, but I did not know what else to do with them. Instead of doing that, I could easily fit an entire library of many thousands of books on one small hard drive. There are may older books, in which the copyrights have expired, as well as some occasional newer books which for various reasons are available in ebook form for free.

• Project Gutenberg
• Arthur's Classic Novels
• ManyBooks.net
• Baen Free Library
• Cory Doctorow's Free Books

I do buy occasional newer printed books too, which are not available for free, so I am still doing my share of helping to support the publishing industry.

I got a Sony Reader for Christmas, and I'm really loving it. http://www.mobileread.com/ has some excellent forums (first link in the bar below the header) where there are quite a few people who own the Reader, Irex's Iliad, and other eInk devices.

Granted, the Connect software is not the greatest, and they have a limited selection of books (they were giving out a $50 store credit with purchase/registration of a Reader, not sure if that's still in effect), but http://www.manybooks.net/ has a good chunk of the Project Gutenberg content, already pre-formatted for the Reader and a bunch of other ebook devices.

Also, the Reader is $350, and another $50 if you want the docking cradle. It comes with a soft cover, though you can buy others in colors (the standard one is black).

Currently on my Palm I have :-
20,000_Leagues_Under_the_Sea.pdb
Accelerando.pdb
Adventures_of_Sally,_The.pdb
A_Strange_Manuscript_Found_i.pdb
Beowulf.pdb
Canterbury_Tales_and_Other_P.pdb
Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar,_Th.pdb
Celtic_Fairy_Tales.pdb
Concrete_Jungle,_The.pdb
Cyberpunk_Fakebook,_The.pdb
dracula.pdb
earthbnd.pdb
Eves_Diary.pdb
Food_of_the_Gods_and_How_It_.pdb
Frankenstein.pdb
GNU_Manifesto,_The.pdb
History_of_China,_A.pdb
Human_Machine,_The.pdb
Land_That_Time_Forgot,_The.pdb
lexal.pdb
lost.pdb
Moby_Dick.pdb
New_Hackers_Dictionary,_The.pdb
Oldest_Code_of_Laws_in_the_W.pdb
pbound.pdb
plague.pdb
Relativity_-_The_Special_and.pdb
Report_on_Unidentified_Flyin.pdb
Runaway_Skyscraper,_The.pdb
Scorched_Earth.pdb
Secret_of_the_Ninth_Planet,_.pdb
Silas_Marner.pdb
Stephen R. Donaldson - Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - 7+ ebooks
Strange_Manuscript_Found_in_.pdb
The_Arabian_Nights.pdb
The_Emancipatrix.pdb
The_Raven__The_Masque_of_the.pdb
The_Voyage_of_the_Beagle.pdb
The_War_of_the_Worlds.pdb
Ulysses.pdb
Wailing_Asteroid,_The.pdb
War_and_Peace.pdb

and I have still got 25 MB free out of my 51MB built in memory.

I had an issue with the appearance of the text on the screen, but after a little judicious tinkering with the text and background colours, plus adjusting the brightness slightly, I now have it set up so that I can read at least as long as I can with a real book. I like using my thumb to turn the page with just a touch, and I like having a selection available when I finish a "book" while on public transport.

In short, there is really nothing wrong with the concept, it's just the usual attitude adjustment that need to take place.

I read lots of ebooks on my Palm Tungsten W. At the moment I'm re-reading the complete works of E. A. Poe (first time I read I's too young to perceive all the nuances).

Now, most of my ebooks come from Memoware, a site dedicated to free ebooks (and they have an extensive list of titles).

Plus, they have a store as well, where you can buy titles that are not public domain yet.

I also download free ebooks from the Project Gutenberg from Many Books, a site that converts plain text files from PG to a range of PDA readers' formats.

Not all e-books are DRM'd up the wazoo, manybooks.net has 12,537 free un-DRM'd texts available in a variety of formats for each text. They are produced by Project Gutenberg and if you like you can help out too !

I have a palm tungsten C which has ended up being used mainly as an e-reader. I currently have around 70 full length books on it, and one of the best aspects of it is, if I get bored of one book and feel like a change, when I go back to the same book later on, it's still at the same page (dead handy for tomes like War and Peace !). Add to that the inline dictionary, bookmarks and notepad and it's a cool tool.

I have had to play with the background and font colours a bit to get it just right for my eyes, but now I can read comfortably at the same distance as I would a normal book, either while in the dark in bed, or in daylight.

Also, as the Tungsten C is wireless, I can dload the ebooks to my home server, and if I need to add a new selection to the palm, I just dload it over the LAN, and it goes right into the library. No need to fire up the crappy "Documents To Go" software on my XP laptop anymore.

Battery life is fine. I can read a whole book with only one recharge, as long as I turn off the wifi.

I have yet to see any real life "e-paper" and so I'll reserve judgement, but it can't be much easier to use than my tungsten c.

However, I use rss all the time. For example, I have around 300 xvid files that I like to access quickly, so I wrote a perl script to create an rss feed so that each title links to (and plays via file type association) the relevant file. No internet even needed there, although I do run Apache so that my windows box can run the same files over the LAN and display them through my projector :->
It's useful for me....

Another useful aspect (in Firefox anyway) is the live bookmark. I have live bookmarks for manybooks.net (shows me recent additions to the download list) and Redhat (shows me the latest articles in the RH magazine).

Also, as I run linux, I have access to something called gDesklets, this being a desktop applet system for Gnome. One of the applets is a News/RSS Grabber. I have 2 of these running on the desktop, one gets its feed from /. the other from BBC News. Have a look. (The clock is an applet too)

I don't think it needs to be part of the OS, but that doesn't mean it's not useful.

It also talks about the famous Steve Jackson Games court case, and lots of good history about the BBS days. It also talks about the first hackers, and believe me it goes far, far back, long before computers existed... Required reqading.

Then go to Manybooks.net and pick a different format. They have the Gutenberg collection, but in a wide variety of formats. I personally use the iSolo format for my palm pilot (a T3 with the wide screen which means I get a full page of book text per screen), and I rarely have formatting issues. In fact, books are a pleasure to read.

But for Jhymn, I'd never buy from iTMS. But a very acceptable (for me) DRM for eBooks is from http://www.ereader.com/, which used to be Palm Digital Media. Considering books are much smaller in size and costs more than music, I am happy with the DRM offered there. No centralized server that keeps authenticating the client. The "key" is the Credit Card number that was used to buy the book. That, to some extent disallows putting the book in P2P networks. And the client is available for Win32, OS X, PocketPC and Palm OS. They even have an ebook maker software that can convert txt files to eBooks. http://www.manybooks.net/ makes Gutenberg books available in eReader format. That, I say is even less restrictive form of DRM than iTMS, which many consider to be the least restrictive. (The price of eBooks from ereader.com is not much cheaper and some time higher than the dead tree versions. Odd.)

manybooks.net has ereader-ized most of Gutenberg, and ereader.com and ebooks.com have lots of modern stuff, so there's lots to read.

I use my Palm Tungsten T3 as an ebook reader, and I love it. Got some extra fonts to use on its 320x480 screen, and by the use of some very readable, but small, fonts I can get 55 characters per line and 40 lines per screen. Check it out at your local bookstore: That's identical to a typical paperback book. That's right, I get one page per screen...just like a book. Unlike a paper book, I carry around with me dozens of the greatest books in history. I'm reading Shakespeare, Wodehouse, Dickens, Trollope, Tolstoy, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Chekov (insert your favorite Trek joke here), Cervantes, and lots of Sherlock Holmes. Don't like my taste in books? Get yer own. But that's my list and I'm stickin' to it. And there's no way I could carry all those books around with me if they were not in electronic form. But because I have all those books, I can read whatever I'm in the mood for whenever the reading mood hits. Commuting to work, waiting for a movie to start, lounging in bed, whatever. It's there all the time.

I use iSilo to read the books, and I use Many Books to download free (yes, free) books from the Project Gutenberg collection in whatever format you want. I use the iSilo version, but they have plenty of other including plain text or HTML.

What about current books? I get some of those too, but mostly I'm enjoying catching up on the classics of literature. Something that ebooks makes so easy that it impelled me to catch up. As ebook readers improve (and I love the T3 already), this dynamic will only get better. Kids today will grow up thinking of text as something that is supposed to be electronic. Regular books will be around forever, but they will get marginalized as the younger generation embraces the new. As for me, I love ebooks and will try to read in that format as much as I can.

manybooks.net has the majority of PG's etexts available in PDF as well as many formats suitable for reading on your Palm, or other PDA (including zTXT for weasel reader, iSilo, Plucker, PalmDOC, eReader, Rocketbook, etc).