[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

Ok, FictionWise:

William Gibson: yes, multiple titles
Patrick O'Brian: none
Stephen Baxter: yes, multiple titles
Simon Singh: one title... well, it's non-fiction on a site named FictionWise...
Orson Scott Card: limited titles
Tolkien: none
Neal Stephenson: yes
Ian M. Banks: none

You are at the mercy of the publishers. As far as I know, for instance, there are no authorized ebook editions of Tolkien.

It's possible to find all manner of stuff on the darknet, if you don't mind coping with someone's OCRed scan of a paper book. Personally, I can't be bothered. I have more stuff in electronic form than I have time to read now, without adding stuff that was an unauthorized conversion of a paper edition.

I'll add another perspective. I read a lot of ebooks, but my device isn't a dedicated reader: it's a Palm OS PDA. I need a device that does more than just read ebooks. Right now, I carry a call phone and a PDA. I won't carry a cell phone, a PDA, and a reader. And no "converged" combo cell phone/PDA works for me. The problem is form factor, and specifically screen size. A device small enough to be a useful cell phone has a screen too small for some of the other things I do.

My device happens to be an orphan. I have a Tapwave Zodiac 2. Tapwave went belly up in July 2005, but I'm not concerned -- I have a spare and a "parts" unit if something happens to it. Tapwave was trying to craft a device that was a handheld gaming platform as well as Palm OS PDA. It has a 200mhz ARM processor, 128MB of RAM, and ATI graphics chip with 2D acceleration and 8MB of on-board video memory, Yamaha stereo sound, and two SD card slots. One of the slots is SDIO, so I can use a Wifi SD card to go online. The Zodiac has a 320x480 screen with "virtual" DIA.

The biggest issue I have is that there isn't a standard ebook format that everyone supports. To cover all the bases, I maintain five readers, and must recall which content is in which format read by what reader.

I want to get content once, and read it on whatever I happen to have. My preference is to get content in HTML format, which I can read directly in a browser on desktop or laptop, and convert for Plucker, a free, open source, offline HTML viewer for Palm devices. I also have content in Mobipocket, eReader, PDF, and Word, RTF and ASCII text formats.

PDF is handled by the open source PalmPDF application, which views "native" PDF files on a card. Word, RTF, and ASCII text I read with an open source viewer called PalmFiction, which reads those files from a card. (Word and RTF are rendered as plain text.)

PDFs are problematic on any handheld. They usually don't reflow to fit the screen, and can be painful to read on smaller devices. If I have a choice, I get content in a different format. PalmPDF covers the cases where I don't have the choice.

I got into PDAs as ebook readers when my then employer decided all IT staffers should have PDAs, and presented me with a Handspring Visor Deluxe. It wasn't clear what I was supposed to do with it, so I went looking for software that would help me do my job as a sysadmin, and discovered I could get technical documentation in a form I could convert and read on my PDA, rather than carrying large heavy manuals. I didn't expect to appreciate reading fiction on the device, but discovered I could do that and like it too.

The Visor Deluxe was a low res device with a 160x160 mono screen supporting 4 shade grey scale. I went from the Deluxe to a Visor Pro (also 180x160 mono), to a Tungsten E (320x320 color) to my current Zodiac.

At this point, I have about 3,500 ebooks on my device, primarily in Plucker, but also in the other formats mentioned. Plucker, eReader, and Mobipocket support color, embedded images, text attributes, fonts, and hyperlinks, as well as search and things like dictionary lookups.

Because it's a Palm OS PDA, I also have PIM functions, and with the appropriate software, the device is an MP3 player, video player, photo viewer and games device, as well as serviceable word processor and spreadsheet viewer. I can go on line, too, and do email, but I seldom do the former as extant browsers leave somewhat to be desired, and don't want to do the latter on the PDA. Email can wait till I have desktop or laptop handy, thank you.

I wouldn't mind a larger device with a bigger screen. I've seen eInk, and it's lovely. But I need color, which is several years off in eInk at best, and I need multi-function. I can't justify the prices being charged for a device that is solely a book viewer.

If someone made a device in the Sony or Bookeen form factor that had color and supported all of the other things I currently do on my PDA, I'd happily jump, but no one does.
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Dennis