I am a huge fan of eBooks. I own a Dell Axim X5 PocketPC, and my favorite use for it is for reading eBooks. For those that aren’t familiar with them, eBooks are digital versions of a normal books. You can buy eBooks from lots of online retailers, such as eBooks.com or Amazon. Not only are novels digitized, but you can find magazines, ezines, and reference books in digital format. There are still many books that are not available digitally, but the number is growing.
Before I tried it, I was a bit skeptical about reading an eBook on a PocketPC. I had looked at a couple eBooks on CRT monitors, and I couldn’t see myself looking at a monitor screen to read a book. It just didn’t seem right. I guess it felt like overkill to have a computer and monitor running, using up all that power, when you could just open a paperback, not use any power, and not feel like you are ruining your eyes by being so close to a “tv screen”.
Reading an eBook on a handheld device such as a PocketPC (I have not tried reading eBooks on Palm devices yet) is really comfortable! I’ll admit that it took a little while to get used to the pages not holding as many words as a paper page, but I soon got used to it and love reading books in this format. The characters are clear, easy to read, and the low-power backlit screen is easy on the eyes. Because it is backlit, you can read in a dark room. This is perfect for me because I don’t want to disturb Mariko or the baby while they sleep. The size of the characters is adjustable, and the software remembers the page you were last on, or the page furthest read. You can also add annotations to a book.
Another advantage of Ebooks is their portability. On average, the size of my ebooks is about 380k each, with “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” being 277k. That means that my relatively small 128MB memory card can hold a library of approximately 337 ebooks! Besides the advantage of having a huge library at your fingertips wherever you go, you will save a ton of shelf space in your home.
It’s also very convenient to be able to download a book from home. I’ll admit that I enjoy going to the bookstore and browsing the stacks, but sometimes it’s just easier to do it online.
So far, I have used Microsoft’s Reader (.lit files), and uBook (.txt and .html files). They are both very nice and intuitive. Besides the settings for fonts, you just have to know which button (configurable) will go forward a page, or back a page. uBook has some more options, like page orientation and font face. There are also Adobe’s Acrobat Reader and MobiPocket format.
A couple drawbacks to eBooks are that they don’t seem to handle graphics too well, for instance the maps in Tolkien books, or the diagrams in the Agatha Christie mysteries. Also, as I mentioned above, it is not easy to see your progess in an eBook (at least with the Microsoft Reader. If there is an easy way to see this, I’d love to know!). And lastly, you cannot find every book in digital format.
To find out more about eBooks and eBook readers, do a search on Google, or click here.