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Originally Posted by wodin
A few years ago I read everything by Arthur Conan Doyle and most of Edgar Rice Burroughs on a Palm Pilot, mostly because they were free and I was doing a lot of commuter flying at the time. It nicely filled those one or two hour waits at the terminal for a half hour flight.
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I have a friend who did that, because he worked for a big multi-national and lived on airplanes. Loading up some books on his PDA was a lot lighter and more convenient than packing 6 to 8 in his luggage.
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That, incidentally was my entry into world of e-reading. I've never looked back!
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I started when my then employer decided all the IT folks should have PDAs, and a Handspring Visor Plus arrived in interoffice mail. It wasn't clear what I was supposed to
do with it, so I went looking for things that could assist me in my job as a sysadmin.
One think I found was Plucker, an open source offline HTML reader for Palm OS. A lot of the documentation for things I dealt with was available in HTML format, and could be easily converted for Plucker on the PDA, so I could carry a documentation library in my pocket in a searchable form.
I didn't think I'd appreciate fiction in that format, but a few experiments showed me that I could, so things like conversions of the entire Baen Free Library wound up on my device. I no longer use a Handspring, but I still use a Palm OS PDA, and there are close to 4,000 Plucker files on it, as well as about 400 Mobipocket books and an assortment of other things in eReader, PDF, Word, RTF, and text format.
I'm gradually reading some classic stuff I'd been meaning to get to, like Macauley's essays, historical works by Schiller, as well as Burroughs, Conan Doyle and the like, and Project Gutenberg gets a daily visit to look for other things to convert.
I still buy and read paper books, however. eBooks are an additional format, and not a replacement here. Many of the art, photography, and design volumes in my library just would not work as ebooks.
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Dennis