[marvmax]

I was teaching an adult Sunday School class and noticed that some of the real geeks were reading their scriptures on PDA's. I thought that it looked like a good idea, and would cut down on things that I would have to lug around to teach my class.

My employer offered to buy a PDA for us, and I went ahead and said that I'd like one. I really liked the syncing of my calendar and contacts. You really can't beat trying to set up a meeting and being able to pull your calender out of your pocket and check it (I know you can do this with a day timer type binder but the size really kept me from implementing it correctly. I always found myself without it.) I found I could download technical documents in PDF document and read them when I got a chance. And yes I put my scriptures on it. Next I started jotting down notes on the thing. Then I started doing it while I was studying the scriptures so I always had my notes and scriptures together. I now have no idea where my pScriptures even are. I know they must be somewhere because I had them when I got my first PDA and I haven't thrown them out, but I don't have any idea where they are.

So then I started branching out to see if there were other things that I could find to read. One of the first things that I found was a little program that could turn books from the GospeLink library into YanCEyware Books. YanCEware is the program that I use to read the scriptures with on a Windows Mobile platform. So now I was reading technical stuff (boring), scriptures (spiritually uplifting but can only be consumed in small amounts daily, at least for me), religious books (fasicnating). So I started looking around for sources of fiction to read.

Let me take a step back. Like probably every person on this site I am a voracious reader, and so is everyone in my family. Our families idea of a perfect Saturday evening is where everyone sits around the living room and reads their own book. The problem is that there is no way we can have room for all the books that we read if we keep them all, so we make/made heavy use of the public libraries.

So now I'm looking around for fiction to read on my PDA and I find the Gutenberg Project. OK but not really what I'm looking for. Then David Weber wrote, I think it was the 10th book of the Honor Harrington series and I reserved it from the library, and it came with the free CD in the back. I didn't even know what it was when I first stuck it in my computer, but I figured it out. Nearly nivana. Suddenly I had lots of fiction to read, and the kind of fiction I've loved since I was a kid, and a link to a site where I could feed my addiction with very reasonable priced books, with no problem of where to store them, and (as has already been mentioned) a catalog that went back to 1999. Also, no DRM, which I didn't even know was a problem because I first bought only from Webscriptions. Then I visited my brother and he had some Vince Flynn books, which I love, and I decided to read them on my PDA, but to do that I had to buy from another site, and was introduced to the nightmare of DRM. It took me 2 days to finally get all the stars aligned so that I could read my legally purchased e-book (I believe it resolved around the fact that I was on vacation and was using my brothers computer to buy the e-books, but my PDA was not synced to his computer, and... anyway I was convinced that I didn't want to buy any thing that was DRMed again.)

I can't say that I don't read pBooks anymore. I do like reading religious/philosophy oriented books, and that's a small market to begin with, so I haven't noticed that eBooks are even an option. I don't know why. I'm pretty sure that all books are, at one time or another, before being printed, in an e-format of some kind. The cost of offering it as an eBook would seem to be small once the original cost of setting up a distribution system are met, and it seems like there are services such as Webscriptions and Fictionwise that sell books for different publishers so how much can that be really? Oh well I know that I would buy more e-books from different publishers if they did it more like Baen.

I hate sounding like a Baen/Webscriptions commercial when I'm on this site. I guess I should just count my blessings that they do things the way they do, and I like what they offer. I used to never really pay attention to publishers, just writers, but I'm now starting to notice publishers more and more since it is they that set the distribution, meaning DRM, policies and I won't support DRM of books.

And now a somewhat ironic note. My employer now no longer furnishes PDAs because of security concerns, so after getting me addicted to the things I can no longer use my PDA at work, which I now really hate because I'm back to the old way of doing things "Let me get back to you on that meeting until I can get back to my office and check my schedule." And when I say no longer furnishes PDAs I mean no longer allows PDAs where I work. I'd gladly bring my own since they are so helpful, but not allowed.