I wonder if it would be possible to have, within the confines of mobileread maybe, a thread/sticky/wiki entry purely devoted to the listing and evaluating of e-book sites. Most of the information I'm thinking of is already out there, but it's all over the place - some in e-book news, some in Iliad Content etc. What if we had just one point of access for all that? Entries could read something like

Project Gutenberg - Public Domain books, large number of titles, do your own formatting

or

http://books.google.com/ - not all titles available as single download, some scans appallingly bad

etc.

I realize there are sites out there that list e-book resources, but very few of them grade them in terms of useability, none that I've seen are user-editable like a wiki entry, and a mobileread site could focus on individual hardware requirements - you know, this site is good for Palm PCs, but lousy for the Iliad, that one is good for the Sony Reader, but sucks for others etc..

I waste a lot of time looking for books online and locating promising-looking sites only to find out at the very end that they don't meet my requirements - they only have formats available that I have no use for, or they only have scans instead of true electronic documents... Wouldn't it be great to have something like the epinions.com of e-books?

Thoughts?

I think that something like this would be great in wiki form on MobileRead. The wiki area is available for editing, so if anyone wants to start adding this kind of info, feel free to put some structure together for it. I don't remember, but there might even be something similar started already. I've been wanting to put some of the info from this thread in the wiki also... http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3968

I like the way you're thinking about what basic few pieces of info are most relevant for us to keep track of for each site. We want it to be useful info, but simple so it's easy to keep updated and to pick out with a quick read.

There are some sites trying to do some of this at a book-level. They whole "how do I find a good ebook to read in a format I can use" question is not very well solved at the moment. I think the high level approach you suggest swith some simple facts about various ebook source sites are organized in a simple way is a good idea.

Well, I typically use Books Online as a starting point, it indexes a lot of other sites.

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

You know, I would start messing with this

http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_stores

(and probably rename it E-Book Sites),
but I have no idea how to enter a form or table into a wiki.
Not a clue. Anyone?

If somebody could just track down some basic code and copy & paste it, I can probably take it from there...