Quote:
Originally Posted by tnhh
Thanks. You need to use the Bookshout website to read these. There appear to be iOS and Android apps as well but I haven't tried them. |
Okay, I got around to selecting one of the books that was being offered by an alias for Simon & Schuster/BookShout called
http://250words.com. I like my selection, it looks like a good book.
Folks, BookShout is offering some very high-quality books for
free. If you are interested in non-fiction at all, I hope that you will look over the selection and see if there are any that you can't pass up. Don't let the "business" description deter you from checking into them--none of them are "heavy" reading and several of them deal with personal business and other subjects that everyone can relate to.
As tnhh pointed out, you
do need to use either Bookshout's website, or iOS or Android O/Ss to read your book. I don't have a smartphone, so I will be using the website.
After I "downloaded" the book, I wondered if the book had, in fact, been
downloaded on to my hard drive. Apparently it had not as I could find no trace of it there. It appears that the book is on (has stayed on?) a server of Simon & Schuster/BookShout's and whenever you want to read the book, your computer brings it up (here I'm beginning to show my ignorance of computers and computer terminology; please bear with me) from their server. The same thing apparently happens if you read it using iOS or Android on your smartphone. If I am right, you would have to have Wi-Fi or a cellular connection or something else to hop on (I hope that I'm not getting too technical here. haha) the Internet each time that you wanted to read the book on your smartphone.
Of course, I would much prefer to have the books actually on my hard drive, for a whole lot of reasons that I won't get into here. You are probably like me about that. After the book that I chose became available for me to read, I saw several other books in my "library" that I had "downloaded" from BookShout in the past. When I was looking for evidence on my hard drive of the having the free book that I had just chosen, I also looked around for evidence of these other books on my hard drive and they were nowhere to be found. Why did I get those books from BookShout? Well, that was the only way to get them for
free, it was a matter of "take it or leave it," and I decided that I'd rather have it free on BookShout's terms than not have it at all.
As I mentioned in my post on 5/20 at 9:10 p.m., I'm sure that there is a way to convert books on websites to standard ebook formats. I would like to do that with these books that I got from BookShout. However, I will have to check the agreement(s), that I ticked that I agreed to, first to make sure that I wouldn't be in violation of it(them).
Before starting this post I did a search of this (Mobileread.com) website to see if there was any information about BookShout or this issue that I've discussed. I didn't really find anything. So . . . I thought that it might be important to "put something out there" for the archives, if nothing else. Also, I thought that some MobileReaders (especially with more knowledge than I) might be interested in discussing this or bringing in some additional or corrected information; if so, I'm sure that it would need to be taken to a different forum, however.
Thanks.