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I am not willing to pay a hardback book price for an ebook. If an ebook were 1/4 the price of a hardback book (or paperback book if the book is in paperback), I would consider it. And I am not willing to try to use an ebook in some closed or proprietary format that I won't be able to use in a few years when formats and technologies change.

I have been reading free ebooks from memoware.com on my Palm IIIxe (using the free and simple text reader CSpotRun) for years. Most of these books are from Project Gutenberg, so they are from before 1925, but there are a lot of good stories that are still interesting and/or relevant now. Reading a book on a Palm Pilot is not completely practical, but I have read "War and Peace" that way and it's manageable.

To catch on, e-books will need to be neutral as to the medium they are read on, like MP3's. They should be readable on a PC, Mac, Laptop, PDA, Phone, e-book reader, or whatever you have handy. Right now the "official" e-book schemes tie text to hardware in a way that ensures the market stays fragmented. But if you look at the amount of free or paid books available for the PDA / PC, it becomes clear that e-books aren't a failure, e-book hardware is.

Frederic Bastiat in 1848 wrote a nice essay called "That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen" dealing with this topic handily. A good portable copy is at Memoware.

However, then as now many lawmakers were persuaded by this lie and protected the established players from competition. Because of bullshit analyses like Tocqueville's we can look forward to many more years of a sluggish economy. As soon as we stop shielding big players vis-a-vis "intellectual property" we'll see a nice upturn.

Also, AportisDOC is not open, documented, or freely usable, without substantial commercial licensing.

Please drop the false accusations.

Additionally, you can see that LinuxDOC uses Plucker format. Oddly, I don't see their HOWTO docs in AportisDOC format. Project Gutenberg is considering the move to Plucker as well, last I heard.

How about checking out the thousands of Plucker ebooks out there, before spinning your tripe.

MemoWare also has a large selection of free ebooks.

For sure. MemoWare has thousands of free ebooks for handhelds. Reading on a PDA instead of, say, a laptop also doesn't hurt as much when you fall asleep and drop it on the dog laying next to the bed.

I store lots of books (40+) on my Palm; some of these are really huge texts (1000+ pages) in paper. But on a Palm it makes no difference at all.

And I can read a little at a time, whenever there's a spare moment; in a long queue at the supermarket, waiting for something to compile etc. It's like recycling all those otherwise wasted bits of time.

The other advantages are psychological. In normal books, I have a real problem with keeping my focus on the text I'm actually reading. As soon as I turn a page, my eyes flick down to the end of the next page, breaking my flow. Because of the small screen, I've got only a few sentences visible at any time so I can't inadvertently skip forward.

The other psychological benefit is a bit harder to explain. With a normal big paper book, it's quite a daunting feeling to see how little progress I've made after reading for quite some time. This can end up deterring me from reading the rest of the book. But on the Palm (and particularly with iSilo) there's a sense of progress through the chapter, not the whole book. So even a couple of minutes reading feels like it's made a dent.

There's a huge collection of ebooks available at Memoware, many of them converted by me! :-)

Just read this last night in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, and it really sums up my attitude:

"As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

This was after being offered a patent on the Franklin Stove. He basically gave the technology away. Same with the lightning rod.

M@

Reminds me of a story I just read on my palm, an older story by H.G. Wells. You can download it free at memoware for free.

M@

Typically, when a book is released as an eBook it is in addition to the print version.

Orson Scott Card released _Shadow of the Hegemon_ as a eBook and a treeBook. I own the whole Ender series in paper except this one.

Hemmingway, Faulkner and Melville are all available for download to your Palm *FOR FREE* at Memoware

I have read several longer books from cover-to-cover on the palm. It's actually MORE comfortable than a real book.

Biggest bonus: It's difficult to sneak a hard cover into the stall at work, but the Palm is invisible. (Especially with the ultra geeky palm enabled dockers) [Palm in the bathroom ... that's a troll]

"Humans are seldom more irrational then when you are attacking their prejudices" (?Tpa'u - Enterprise?)

M@

I asked Orson Scott Card to sign my Palm Pilot (in the Diddle Application) and he refused, saying something about "Reproduceable Signature." Like it's that hard to scan the real signature he put on my Tree-Book version of Ender's Game.

BTW: Orson Scott Card Rocks!

I agree with the EBooks Rock opion though. I've read over 20 books on my PalmV.

PeanutPress has been around for a couple years and has all the new release e-books, but it'll cost ya.

Memoware has a TON of free stuff, classics and the like from the Guetenburg project.

M@

I have to agree...I have read both "The hacker crackdown" and "In the beginning there was the command line" on my m125- its easy and fun. And those two books are available for free at memoware

You're right, this is a great read.

I downloaded this (http://www.memoware.com/b/commandline.pdb) and read it from my PDA. It provided a couple/few hours of reading enjoyment during the slow times onboard my submarine....I'll bet Mr. Stephenson could've never foreseen his work being read in a weirder place than under the sea!

Anyways, I wonder if he will add an epilogue that covers the changes brought about by MacOSX.

• Alexlit
  
• Mind's Eye
  
• Peanut Press/Palm Digital Literature
  
• Fictionwise
  
• MemoWare
  
• Baen Webscriptions/Free Library

AFAICT, there are only two features that e-books have over regular books:

1) You can use the same physical device for multiple content. Unless you are on the space shuttle, who cares?

2) You can download books from the Internet. Great, except has anybody here tried to use Napster/Gnutella recently? From the moment you first start looking to the moment you are able to use the (correct) file how much time elapses?

Gutenberg or Gnutella'd titles take a little longer, as I have to unwrap the text before running it through a converter--but even then, emacs makes it easy enough that it just takes a couple of minutes and a few Meta-X commands before I'm done. And if it's a Gutenberg book or otherwise freely available, I can even donate it to the Memoware free e-book library when I finish. (Search under "Meadows" there for all the titles I've donated so far.)

For me, reading books on my Visor is fast, convenient, and a sure-fire boredom fighter. But to each his own.

The box that the handera is packaged in claims that it has MP3 support. I'd guess it would have to be a CF card, but there is no further info in the box to tell me where I can order any of the accessories they claim to support on the box (they claimed a couple other things on the box that I was skeptical of as well).

Other "useful" info:

the CD is Windows only...and some of the Handera licenced software on the CD can only be loaded on a PC. This is a real bite, since one of the vendors even has a Mac and a Linux version of their software. No info was included on how to transfer the license to a version that I could use. (I refuse to load Windows on a box just so I can load an app onto my PDA)

I had to download the latest Palm Desktop software for my Mac to sync anything to it. (note that there was no indication in the included materials of how to do this or even that this would work, even though they claim Mac support on the box.) I was also able to use Pilot Link under Linux on my Vaio. I had to use the serial port though...in limited playing I couldn't get it to sync over IR. I'm sure I had something set up wrong on my laptop though. After reading through the Inrared-HOWTO and doing some google searches, I just gave up and plugged in the Viao dongle thing with the serial port on it, and synced with that without problems.

There's a wonderful review at MemoWare that you should definitely read if you're thinking about buying one. I couldn't sift through all the marketing BS at handera's website to figure out what it could and couldn't do. After reading the PDA newsgroups and this review, I was convinced that my money would not be wasted buying one. After getting one, I am convinced that it was worth the money. (second one is on order)

YMMV,
Michael

You can read the marketing hype at Handera's website. [Note: Handera used to be TRG, but changed their name for some silly reason] Or you can read this excellent review at MemoWare.

The only thing I disagree with them on is the use of serial instead of USB. I can understand their desire to make it compatible with all of the palm III add-ons, but still.

As for linux support...I have no idea.

for what it's worth,
Michael

Try using RichReader. It's free and works well IMHO. You can download it at Palm Pilot Archives.

You may also want to check out MemoWare. There are many documents for download.

There are several readers available, many of which are freeware or open source. Http://www.palm-press.com/ has more info, as does
http://www.peanutpress.com and there's even a Slashdot article on it

Don't forget:
http://www.memoware.com/
http://www.tomeraider.com/

www.matthewmiller.net

YMMV, but reading on a PDA fills a certain niche for me. At any given point, I'm plowing through between 2 and 8 various books. There's one by my bed, one in my office, one in the kitchen, one next to the comfy chair...and one on my Palm.

The one on the Palm is for when you're locked in some time-wasting mode; whip out the PDA and fill that time with something better than the dentist's 4 year old People mags (or the CEO's annual state of the company address...) It's portable, and most importantly, always with you, because it's hard to predict when you're really going to need something worthwhile to read.

Added bonus: Andrew Lang's colored fairy books are all in the public domain; several are available in DOC format. If you ever need something to read in the dark to a sick 5 year old at 3 AM, a backlit PDA is a blessing. Pretty good stories for adults too, if you're into that sort of thing. They're the originals, before DisneyCo got their saccharin mouseclaws into them.

Hello Katz,

I'd be more than happy to share some of my reading habits with you.

Newspapers have never quite tickled my fancy, I've always had a hard time to tackle an overly large and totally untame sheet of paper. The times I do read something news worthy would be over a person's shoulder or when it appears in a more tame form (ie. cut into pieces).

On the average, being a geek, I'm a real busy person and would give almost nothing to the major newspapers out there (but I'v seen the new Onion), politics and gossip just does not delight me. The only time you do see me get over my boredom and read something in default format would be to turn the newspaper on it's back, and explor the last few pages in the hope of finding something comical to entertain.

The same goes for traditional books. I am an avid reader, but over the last few years, I've been slacking very badly (since it's just not economically possible to read a book anymore nowdays). All sorts of constraints apply when reading a book.

My solutions arrived in the form a small electornic device (which I immediatly dubbed 'garo' -- a long lost feline friend). This device was a PalmOS based Handspring Visor Delux, with 8mb ram and the ability to upgrade using an unique hardware modular slot (even though it's flash is not upgradeable).

After having exhausted my batters in less than a week (of continuous play with the Visor), I decided to explore the waste expances of software available for PalmOS. I installed utility after utility, getting delighted with the slightest twist of a coding wizard (and yes the little mirror program that turned your palm screen black did send giggles up my spine and entertain a whole load of female friends).

One of the delightfully free software that was buzzed down my USB connection into my Visor was AvantGo. Which was a mixture of channel based online newsfeeds and other resources (even /. could be tamed to exist inside my avantgo). I quickly started to apperciate the depth and breath of this free services and the number of channels available on my Visor. This is the time I started to read newsspapers seriously. I have the following channels on my Visor, CNet's News.com channel (updated puter type microsoftish news), ExploreZone (Scientific not so in depth news), HollyWood.com (Movie times for my city! very important -- daily as everyting else), New York Time ( traditional media now readable), PalmCentral/PDABuzz, Slashdot.org (Oh baby .. this could be created by making a custom channel in avant go and putting this URL in), The weather channel (Ok, not so necessary in the desert :))), USAToday (fine with me), Wired News (Some low tech is fine while doing the daily garbage disposal).

I take my visor everwhere, it fits snuggly in my pocket and feels very conforatble in my hand. All channels are updated at least once a day. I usually update early morning and in the evenining. News is read where I happen to be :)

Now that takes care of news.. What about books?! It took me over a month to get into books on my Visor and man.. Now I'm reading almost 2 books a week after that. My fav doc reader would undoubtably be Bill Clagett's CSpotRun, A GPLed reader that is undoubtably the king of all Doc Readers out there. It has the ability to make the fonts closer, to turn the text into every single position known on the pilot (read from the sides or upside down?), autoscroll, drag scroll, scroll using the pageup-pagedown (fun!), and anything you could contribute! Ebooks are fun! Most books from the gutenberg project have been converted into ebooks over at MemoWare also you could OCR any book you own and convert it into doc format using the linux doctoolkit. Others check here. I have read War and Peace (over 1/2 million words) by Tolstoy (free on tolstoy.org), re-read Most books from William Gibson, Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke and various other entities. I've also had the pleasure of reading classics such as ShakesSpeare, SunTzu, Tolkein, Plato, Confucious and many others right on my PDA.

Overall, the handheld computer with it's extreemly large memory (yes books in electornic format are tiny!) has been the only reason why I've gone back and read so many books (not to mention carry around so many techical notes and moste of the relevant HOWTO pages). I would recommend a handheld PDA to anyone who reads it and encorage them to read electornic Newspapers and e-books on a regualar basis.

Enjoy!
--

Hello Katz,

I'd be more than happy to share some of my reading habits with you.

Newspapers have never quite tickled my fancy, I've always had a hard time to tackle an overly large and totally untame sheet of paper. The times I do read something news worthy would be over a person's shoulder or when it appears in a more tame form (ie. cut into pieces).

On the average, being a geek, I'm a real busy person and would give almost nothing to the major newspapers out there (but I'v seen the new Onion), politics and gossip just does not delight me. The only time you do see me get over my boredom and read something in default format would be to turn the newspaper on it's back, and explor the last few pages in the hope of finding something comical to entertain.

The same goes for traditional books. I am an avid reader, but over the last few years, I've been slacking very badly (since it's just not economically possible to read a book anymore nowdays). All sorts of constraints apply when reading a book.

My solutions arrived in the form a small electornic device (which I immediatly dubbed 'garo' -- a long lost feline friend). This device was a PalmOS based Handspring Visor Delux, with 8mb ram and the ability to upgrade using an unique hardware modular slot (even though it's flash is not upgradeable).

After having exhausted my batters in less than a week (of continuous play with the Visor), I decided to explore the waste expances of software available for PalmOS. I installed utility after utility, getting delighted with the slightest twist of a coding wizard (and yes the little mirror program that turned your palm screen black did send giggles up my spine and entertain a whole load of female friends).

One of the delightfully free software that was buzzed down my USB connection into my Visor was AvantGo. Which was a mixture of channel based online newsfeeds and other resources (even /. could be tamed to exist inside my avantgo). I quickly started to apperciate the depth and breath of this free services and the number of channels available on my Visor. This is the time I started to read newsspapers seriously. I have the following channels on my Visor, CNet's News.com channel (updated puter type microsoftish news), ExploreZone (Scientific not so in depth news), HollyWood.com (Movie times for my city! very important -- daily as everyting else), New York Time ( traditional media now readable), PalmCentral/PDABuzz, Slashdot.org (Oh baby .. this could be created by making a custom channel in avant go and putting this URL in), The weather channel (Ok, not so necessary in the desert :))), USAToday (fine with me), Wired News (Some low tech is fine while doing the daily garbage disposal).

I take my visor everwhere, it fits snuggly in my pocket and feels very conforatble in my hand. All channels are updated at least once a day. I usually update early morning and in the evenining. News is read where I happen to be :)

Now that takes care of news.. What about books?! It took me over a month to get into books on my Visor and man.. Now I'm reading almost 2 books a week after that. My fav doc reader would undoubtably be Bill Clagett's CSpotRun, A GPLed reader that is undoubtably the king of all Doc Readers out there. It has the ability to make the fonts closer, to turn the text into every single position known on the pilot (read from the sides or upside down?), autoscroll, drag scroll, scroll using the pageup-pagedown (fun!), and anything you could contribute! Ebooks are fun! Most books from the gutenberg project have been converted into ebooks over at MemoWare also you could OCR any book you own and convert it into doc format using the linux doctoolkit. Others check here. I have read War and Peace (over 1/2 million words) by Tolstoy (free on tolstoy.org), re-read Most books from William Gibson, Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke and various other entities. I've also had the pleasure of reading classics such as ShakesSpeare, SunTzu, Tolkein, Plato, Confucious and many others right on my PDA.

Overall, the handheld computer with it's extreemly large memory (yes books in electornic format are tiny!) has been the only reason why I've gone back and read so many books (not to mention carry around so many techical notes and moste of the relevant HOWTO pages). I would recommend a handheld PDA to anyone who reads it and encorage them to read electornic Newspapers and e-books on a regualar basis.

Enjoy!
--

You can find some Gutenberg e-texts at

http://www.memoware.com

Happy reading.

This is actually kind of old news; a SalonMag report from months ago on e-books and the Palm Pilot mentions this site--which is how I found it in the first place.

The Good: The e-books are the full text of the books in question--including an 821K The Fire Upon the Deep--at $7, one of the better buys out there. The reader is free, has good features, even including genuine italics, and there's a Java-powered converter you can get to make Peanut-readable books of your own.

They've got some good books there, too. AFUTD, works by Dickson, Silverberg, and so on. I've already bought several books through them.

They're giving away some books for free, too--including the first book in the Remo Williams Destroyer series, and a short story by some guy I've never heard of.

As soon as you buy the books, you download them. Zap, they're on your hard drive--along with the reader, in case you lost it. No shipping delays...boom, instant sync to your Palm.

The Bad: The price on these books is exactly the same as standard retail price--which isn't so bad for if the book is in paperback, as are A Fire Upon the Deep, Dickson's Necromancer and The Tactics of Mistake, and so on. $2-7 for an e-book...well, it's a little more than you'd pay through Amazon (unless you take shipping into consideration), but that's offset by the convenience of being able to slip a full-sized, thick paperback book into your pocket.

But there are also hardcover editions for sale there...for $15, $20, and so forth. And this makes no sense at all, to me. When you pay $20 for a book, you're paying for the difference between that book and paperback. Better binding, bigger pages, and so forth. But there's no such difference between a "hardcover" e-book and a "paperback" e-book. E-books are e-books.

(I can guess, of course, that the reason they do this is that the publishers don't want the e-books to steal business from the physical hardcover books, hence they price them the same. But there just aren't that many e-book readers yet--so it wouldn't really affect their sales much one way or another, and it could lead to the wrong conclusion...the publishers seeing that the e-books aren't selling very well, and deciding that people don't want them.)

There's no Peanut Reader for any platform except the Palm...which means you either get a Palm or run a Palm emulator on your desktop--and you can't run a Palm emulator until you have a Palm ROM, which you get either by buying a Palm and using a ROM reader, or signing up for the development program and going through a bunch of rigamarole to get it.

And mostly, it seems, the only books available are out of print ones--ones that print publishers have, pretty much, already abandoned. Which means there's some good books there, but not a very good selection just yet. Which is a shame.

Other e-book sites:

There are some other sites selling "real e-books" too.

Mind's Eye Publishing has some works by well-known authors, including Silverberg, Greg Costikyan, and Spider Robinson, at reasonable prices.

Alexandria Digital Literature has some e-stories by known names for sale, too, and also features a nifty-neato collaborative filtering literature recommender that really deserves more attention than it's gotten.

Online Originals sells e-books that haven't ever been published anywhere else, for $7 US each. They also have a rather interesting deal where you can buy a share in the royalties of a particular e-book for $500. It's nice that they're optimistic, at any rate.

And we shouldn't forget the Palmtop Library, which has a whole bunch of free, public-domain e-books for immediate download.

E-book reading on the Palm is nice. It'll be nicer still when there's a better selection. I want Snow Crash on my Palm, dammit! And it would be deliciously ironic to be able to read Ben Bova's Cyberbooks, a delightful satire on the publishing industry and the repercussions that occur when someone invents an e-book, as an e-book, don't you think?

not that i can find but a quick look at here and search for 'unix'.

or u could read and digest this forum and extract the best bits, create a checklist yrself from this forum and post it :)

pilots are vc :)