Dawn Murphy posted her thoughts on e-books at palmaddict.typepad.com (http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2005/03/save_a_tree_rea.html):
6th March was the start of e-book week. I often wonder why I don't see more about e-books on PDA sites, productivity, gaming, etc but nothing about books. Is it because statistically most readers are women and most people with PDAs are male? I'll assume so, though I haven't personally researched it, but it seems likely on the basis of anecdotal evidence.
Dawn, you should definitely join Mobileread, which is a place that talks a lot about e-books! Anyways, read the rest of her thoughts especially if you are a newbie to e-books.

PS: Interesting thought on gender statistics. So fellow Mobilereaders... are we predominantly male or female?

I'm a female and I read a bunch of ebooks...I admit, I absolutely adore ebooks. I mostly read science fiction and fantasy, and I tend to accidentally find the most verbose authors...the books are quite often long (in the realm of 1,000 pages). I love the simplicity of carrying around my T|C with ebooks on it (currently, I have 14 ebooks in my library). My back also loves me carrying around my T|C with ebooks--it's a lot lighter than lugging around hardback copies of said books!

The only downside to ebooks in my mind? Not being able to take them into the tub to do some reading while relaxing. ;) Oh well, I guess you can't have everything...

/tk

You know, one invention I hope to see is a scent-distiller attachment to a PDA, which distills out fresh ink smells, like those you get from new books. I'll buy one of those! :D

You know, one invention I hope to see is a scent-distiller attachment to a PDA, which distills out fresh ink smells, like those you get from new books. I'll buy one of those! :D
Or the good old dusty smell of books borrowed from the library ;)

Btw. I am male, but I know that my girlfriend loves reading e-books at least as much as I do.

I love eBooks, but I'm against the DRM-ing of the different formats. I like converting own texts from Gutenberg, but maybe that's too complex for the normal PDA-er. I'm too content with the vast public domain eBooks out there to pay for newer releases. I also disagree with the pricing schemes of eBooks. I think that bypassing the printing and distribution channels should bring the price down lower than the stated prices on these eBook e-tailers' sites.

We do talk about eBooks and related technologies here at MobileRead, but I think the majority of PDA-ers are too busy crafting their lives into this technology to add the headache of trying to decipher the various formats and readers and pricing schemes.

I also miss the bathtub experience with my eBooks (I'm a guy), but I'll live. My GF only reads magazines and Chinese romance novels. If there were a site that sold Chinese romance novels, she'd be in heaven. If there's not, someone's missing out on a golden opportunity.
POL9A

I should add that, although my Zodiac2 is my primary PDA and does all of these wonderful multimedia functions, I have been looking for a use for my "old" T|3 (which I had to replace due to faulty digitizer in the lower half of the screen) and it's recently come to me...turn it into an eBook reader. So I just loaded it up with iSilo and a bunch of converted Gutenberg texts and now I can take a PDA to the gym without it being my main PDA. I just set the font size to "Huge" and hit the autoscroll and read while I treadmill away.
POL9A

I consider myself a Palm power user, though I gotta confess I've never heard of Gutenberg texts. Care to shed a little light on them? I've been wanting to try out iSilo, but I'm sort of waiting until I've got a job so I can actually BUY a copy of it if I like the trial. Nothing worse thatn a trial version running out when you actually want the program but can't buy it yet!!!

/tk

So you go to Project Gutenberg (http://www.promo.net/pg/) and search all over their vast database for the classic literature in digital form that you like. Then you either read it directly in iSilo as a .TXT file, or (as I do) convert them to .PDB's for HotSync-ing to your device's RAM.

As a Mac user, I use PorDiBle (http://pordible.victoly.com/) to do the connversion from .TXT to .PDB if I want to HotSync the files to the PDA's RAM. Or, if you want, iSilo will read .TXT files from the SD card if you transfer them to the card using a card-reader.

Free, classic literature is like a gold mine. Why would I want to pay for stories? Do a search on MobileRead for eBook sites and you'll come across 20-30 sites of free literature just waiting to be read on your PDA.
POL9A

I agree with POL but would also add if you don't want to do the conversions yourself there are plenty of sites that have already converted the texts from PG into other formats. Some might be shady (I've never heard of anyone trying to sell them but I wouldn't be surprised if that was happening.)

Personally I like Blackmask (http://www.blackmask.com) but I'm sure there are others.