Quote:
Originally Posted by French
Thank you for the very helpful replies.
(snip)
I had wondered if anyone offered a service similar to Netflix...charge a monthly rate to have X number of books out at a given time. Believe it or not, I think THIS would be the ideal way to read for me. Maybe it's not profitable...I dunno. But I don't hang onto my books (except cookbooks) and I think a membership service would work well for me.
But it sounds like there might be some library download options. In PDF format. So I'll have to check that out, too.
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Funny you should ask, and I'm shocked that I'm the first to recommend Baen - although I guess you haven't stated you like SF. Baen Books does a "Webscription" that for 15 bucks each month you get that month's releases, guaranteed to be at least a certain number of new books (because sometimes the month has a lot of paperbacks that were previously released as hardbacks.) They are un-encrypted, and released in a multi-format, and you can download them many times in any different format. This means you could download it once in the format for you Sony, and again in whichever format works best for your Blackberry or other device. (you buy these each month, or you can buy them several months ahead)
And even Better, Baen has a FREE LIBRARY! for the cost of a free registration, you may download a large number of books whose authors have agreed to let you read them electronically for free - and most of those are still for sale in paper, too.
The one limitation - Baen Books is a Science Fiction publisher, and if that's not your cup of tea, then it may be frustrating to find your otherwise favorite publisher doesn't do things as well. ( And they have not yet gotten all of their backlist converted to electrons - some if it they don't have electronic rights to, and some of it was never in electronic form.)
Check out
www.baen.com for their homepage, look for Webscriptions ebooks for the subscription plan, and look for the Free Library link, both at the top of the page.