Quote:
Originally Posted by TedPark
Hi all. I'm an avid reader and wannabe polymath and "renaissance man". I already have an extensive collection of paper books. I'm also a heavy duty computer scientist - and am very excited that technology has matured to the point of having useful and workable "electric books"! I got a Sony Reader about a week ago and am generally ecstatic with it. I found your site - and it seems to be one of the best.
But who are you people? There seems to be a lot of work by "volunteers". Yet the quality is high. Is there money in this or are you all just a bunch of zealots? Just asking.  |
Zealots.
I'm a computer guy as well (*nix SysAdmin for a streaming video outfit), with a large collection of both electronic and paper books. (About 3,500 ebooks. Probably more paper volumes, but counting would be difficult, since many are in boxes both here and in an offsite storage facility.)
My reader of choice is a Palm OS PDA, and that's how I got into it to begin with. My previous employer once decided that 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 started looking for software that would assist me in my work. One thing I discovered was Plucker, and offline HTML reader for Palm devices. Much of the documentation for stuff I dealt with was available in HTML format, and Plucker offered the possibility of carrying around a tech library in my pocket.
I didn't originally see myself reading fiction on the PDA, but there's a good deal available in HTML format from the Baen Free Library, Project Gutenberg, and elsewhere that readily converts, and I probably read as much fiction on my PDA as I do in paper editions. (The down side is the need to maintain five different viewers to cover all the bases, and recall which book is in which format viewed with which program, since I have Plucker, eReader, Mobipocket, PDF, RTF, PalmDOC, zTXT, word, and plain ASCII text documents in the mix, and no single extant reader handles all of them.)
I'm not interested in the current generation of dedicated readers. I need my device to do other things besides display ebooks (which all save the Iliad won't do), and I need color support, which no current eInk device offers.
The, the ebook editions offered here are high quality indeed, but they are labors of love, not profit. We all need hobbies...
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Dennis