MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How much purchased content is locked up in proprietary e-book formats?

Sophie · 06-23-2006, 07:32 AM

Apart from the problems caused by a multitude of proprietary formats, ebooks from some of my favourite authors have never been available or there are too many titles missing.

Like many bookworms, I tend to read everything written by a particular author until I have exhausted the list and then find another author I like and do the same. Even if some are out of print they can usually be found through second-hand dealers such as Abe Books.

I live in hope that publishers will, eventually, address the problems associated with ebooks. In the meantime I overcome it by purchasing a paper book, and scanning and proofreading it in an open format that I prefer. Usually HTML or RTF.

This is time consuming yes, but I find it very therapeutic and I can produce an ebook suitable for my eyesight. Many paper books I cannot read because the text is too small and the line breaks too narrow.

I am looking to buying an e-ink reader when they become available. At the moment I use an EBookwise 1150 or a Cybook for indoor reading and an old Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 monochrome tablet pc with Win98 installed for reading in the garden. The latter is a wonderful old dinosaur that most ereading software can be installed on. I mostly use uBook because it can read xml style sheets. I have never found MobiPocket reliable in this respect. It will open my plain html files but not the xml ones.

06-23-2006, 07:32 AM	#7
Sophie Junior Member Posts: 1 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jun 2006	Apart from the problems caused by a multitude of proprietary formats, ebooks from some of my favourite authors have never been available or there are too many titles missing. Like many bookworms, I tend to read everything written by a particular author until I have exhausted the list and then find another author I like and do the same. Even if some are out of print they can usually be found through second-hand dealers such as Abe Books. I live in hope that publishers will, eventually, address the problems associated with ebooks. In the meantime I overcome it by purchasing a paper book, and scanning and proofreading it in an open format that I prefer. Usually HTML or RTF. This is time consuming yes, but I find it very therapeutic and I can produce an ebook suitable for my eyesight. Many paper books I cannot read because the text is too small and the line breaks too narrow. I am looking to buying an e-ink reader when they become available. At the moment I use an EBookwise 1150 or a Cybook for indoor reading and an old Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 monochrome tablet pc with Win98 installed for reading in the garden. The latter is a wonderful old dinosaur that most ereading software can be installed on. I mostly use uBook because it can read xml style sheets. I have never found MobiPocket reliable in this respect. It will open my plain html files but not the xml ones.