Ebook availability

[leekeen]

I just received an iRex iLiad for Christmas and have been very busy trying to locate "e" versions of all my favorite books. Suffice to say I'm seriously considering returning the reader now due to a total lack of available ebooks online.

What do you do when you can't find a specific ebook? Are there services that can and do convert paper print to electronic format?

FYI, a few of the books I'm speaking of are LOTR, A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation, and Opportunity...

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by leekeen

What do you do when you can't find a specific ebook?

Look places other than the normal eBook stores. (That's all they allow us to say here.)

Originally Posted by leekeen

Are there services that can and do convert paper print to electronic format?

No. That would be a copyright violation for the company doing the conversion.

Originally Posted by leekeen

FYI, a few of the books I'm speaking of are LOTR, A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation, and Opportunity...

Good luck finding any of these in (legal) eBook form.

There are many, many eBooks out there. Just that most of them are in the public domain or not "best selling" authors.

[leekeen]

Thank you for the reply, even though it was a little depressing

I have found a few ebooks that were probably not meant to be by their publishers, but those are very, very few and far between.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by leekeen

Thank you for the reply, even though it was a little depressing

I have found a few ebooks that were probably not meant to be by their publishers, but those are very, very few and far between.

Not too depressing, I hope.

Personally, I find "best sellers" to be awful and I have found many unknown authors to be a delightful read.

The early Tarzan books, for example, are in the public domain (you can get them from Project Gutenberg among other places). Burrough's books are much better than the "Me Tarzan, You Jane" of the movies.

Darrel Bain (mostly from Fictionwise) is a very good, but not well known sci-fi author.

Baen books has many of their books available for free download, I'm currently reading 1632 by Eric Flint and it's a very enjoyable read so far.

Finding good books to read for free (or low cost) is pretty easy.

What's hard is saying "I want to get book XXXX in an eBook format" and then try to find it - especially if it's a "best seller".

[sonnyred]

Hopefully with the growth of E-readers most books will become available. The market has yet to fully mature, but with more and more specific e-reading devices being sold the library will only get bigger. I've been looking for the George R R Martin books but can't find them, but I have a lot of Sci-fi, Fantasy and thrillers already on my PC in LIT format that will keep me busy until the library expands.
Actually I've just found the George Martin books on ereader website.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by sonnyred

Hopefully with the growth of E-readers most books will become available.

Publishers have started going back & doing more back catalog stuff. Hopefully this will increase with time.

I've been looking for the George R R Martin books but can't find them,

Pretty much all his stuff is available (Song of Ice & Fire plus older stuff). What books can't you find.

[sonnyred]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Publishers have started going back & doing more back catalog stuff. Hopefully this will increase with time.


Pretty much all his stuff is available (Song of Ice & Fire plus older stuff). What books can't you find.

Hi, I just found the George R R Martin books on the ereader website

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by sonnyred

Hi, I just found the George R R Martin books on the ereader website

Yep, pretty much all the sellers have them in all the various formats out there.

[leekeen]

Rlauzon - That's a very good point. I have to admit that I've been viewing the current availability of ebooks as half empty. I should be focusing on the books I can get instead of the ones I cannot. I'm sure I'll be pleasantly surprised from an in-depth search of the various ebook resources found online. I'm a huge science/technology fan, however, and one major concern of mine is the disproportionate availability of non-fiction. Am I simply making a premature, uneducated observation? Do you know any good non-fiction sources? By the way, I'm also a ginormous sci-fi junkie. Could you recommend a few books/authors for me if you get a spare moment?

Sonnyred - I totally agree with your future thinking concerning ebooks and their related technologies. We've all seen incredible growth in the industry recently with not only the manufacture of multiple readers but also the infrastructure with Amazon, a company with $11 billion dollars in revenue in 2006, and Borders/Sony both opening up ebook stores. If they're successful it will spur the industry exponentially. I've held off my celebratory catwheels though despite these positive signs as I've read articles dating 10 years back talking about why ebooks were going to be "taking off anytime now" or "just around the corner."

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by leekeen

Rlauzon - That's a very good point. I have to admit that I've been viewing the current availability of ebooks as half empty. I should be focusing on the books I can get instead of the ones I cannot. I'm sure I'll be pleasantly surprised from an in-depth search of the various ebook resources found online. I'm a huge science/technology fan, however, and one major concern of mine is the disproportionate availability of non-fiction. Am I simply making a premature, uneducated observation? Do you know any good non-fiction sources? By the way, I'm also a ginormous sci-fi junkie. Could you recommend a few books/authors for me if you get a spare moment?

Off the top of my head:
http://librarianchick.pbwiki.com/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://fictionwise.com/
http://www.baen.com/
http://manybooks.net/
http://www.munseys.com/

I usually don't read non-fiction on my eBook reader. Most of my non-fiction reading needs to be more up-to-date than what's available for eBooks. But for computer books, O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/) has many of their books available as PDFs that are (sometimes) readable on the iLiad.

[sonnyred]

Originally Posted by leekeen

Rlauzon - That's a very good point. I have to admit that I've been viewing the current availability of ebooks as half empty. I should be focusing on the books I can get instead of the ones I cannot. I'm sure I'll be pleasantly surprised from an in-depth search of the various ebook resources found online. I'm a huge science/technology fan, however, and one major concern of mine is the disproportionate availability of non-fiction. Am I simply making a premature, uneducated observation? Do you know any good non-fiction sources? By the way, I'm also a ginormous sci-fi junkie. Could you recommend a few books/authors for me if you get a spare moment?

Sonnyred - I totally agree with your future thinking concerning ebooks and their related technologies. We've all seen incredible growth in the industry recently with not only the manufacture of multiple readers but also the infrastructure with Amazon, a company with $11 billion dollars in revenue in 2006, and Borders/Sony both opening up ebook stores. If they're successful it will spur the industry exponentially. I've held off my celebratory catwheels though despite these positive signs as I've read articles dating 10 years back talking about why ebooks were going to be "taking off anytime now" or "just around the corner."

Hi leekeen, I think the important phrase here is dedicated readers. In the past I think it was a mish-mash of PDA's or PocketPC's but now with the dedicated readers I feel the publishing industry has to take notice. More people like me who are not that good with computers finally have a product that is easy to understand. And with the demand of both the Sony and the CyBook then they must be taking notice. I feel that the next step would be one format that could be understood by all readers. I've got a huge amount of LIT books on my PC but why should I have to convert them to LRF or the Mobipocket format? I should just be able to buy a book and put it on any e-reader device I want without converting anything (maybe for the future?). Anyway I think it's an expanding market and if I had any capital to invest I would probably put it into eBooks.

[shousa]

Originally Posted by leekeen

I just received an iRex iLiad for Christmas and have been very busy trying to locate "e" versions of all my favorite books. Suffice to say I'm seriously considering returning the reader now due to a total lack of available ebooks online.

What do you do when you can't find a specific ebook? Are there services that can and do convert paper print to electronic format?

FYI, a few of the books I'm speaking of are LOTR, A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation, and Opportunity...

The whole situation just really means ebook readers are an expensive "toy" for technofreaks at the moment IMHO.

I think consumers are paying for the "dream" of "what it could be" rather than what it is now - a new technology that is unsatisfactory for the average reader.

[markgladding]

Hello leekeen,

I've compiled a list of some of The top DRM-free eBook sites

I have to agree with rlauzon - there are lots of really high quality eBooks available that are either free or cost about the same as a cup of coffee. Don't let the fact that they're not on the bestseller lists put you off.

Regards,

Mark.

[TadW]

Mark, how come you forgot to include MobileRead, which has 3.000 hand-compiled e-books for download?

[markgladding]

Hello TadW,

Oops. MobileRead is now on the list.

Cheers,

Mark.