Thinking of buying a Sony Reader

[mdbenoit]

Thanks for everyone who replied! Unfortunately, it makes me more hesitant than ever to buy a reader. For me, (or my husband, in this case, because it's a birthday present) a reader will be a huge outlay of money. As I said in a previous post, I have hundreds of ebooks in the eReader DRM format (.pdb) and switching to any of these readers, as far as I can tell (and including the BeBook) means that I'll lose all these books.

Frankly, and as much as I love ebooks, this is one of the reasons more people don't gravitate towards electronic books. With print, all you have to do is take it off the shelf. Any shelf.

You can tell I'm a little frustrated.

[shighfield]

I have tons of ereader books from way back as well. Just google for ereader2html which will convert them to HTML and from there you can format shift to whatever format your reader prefers.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by mdbenoit

I actually read somewhere that PDF is the most common ebook format because it can be read on all readers. So self-publishers and small publishers will definitely offer that format.

The fact that you CAN use PDF for eBooks doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so. You CAN make a tea-pot out of chocolate - but it won't be a very good tea-pot .

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The fact that you CAN use PDF for eBooks doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so. You CAN make a tea-pot out of chocolate - but it won't be a very good tea-pot .

And it definitely would be a terrible waste of chocolate ... (unless it's milk chocolate of course)

[sigma8]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The fact that you CAN use PDF for eBooks doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so. You CAN make a tea-pot out of chocolate - but it won't be a very good tea-pot .

I don't think it's quite that ineffective :P

If you define a teapot as "a covered, spouted vessel in which you can boil water", then you cannot make one out of chocolate, because you'll never get water to a boil before it melts.

I think a better analogy would be using a normal pot (or a pan) as a teapot. You lose more water to steam, and it is not designed for pouring into cups. You'll likely get burned from it splattering all over the place as you try to pour--but some people can probably do it ok.

All that said, if I could have a teapot made out of chocolate right now, I would so go for that.