Dear B-A,
With the large number of titles available in various ebook formats, those who use them soon discover that they need a little help in managing them. I have recently come across a program named Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ Calibre can not only help manage your ebooks, it can do a few more handy tricks. Calibre can also convert ebooks from one format to another. One can also download a wide array of newspapers and magazines in some 30 languages apart from English; Yemen Times anyone?
One other excellent feature of Calibre, is that is free.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford ===============================
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Carl
Thanks for the very informative introduction in a nut shell to ebooks, you have me sold.
Greg
Sent: Monday, 19 December 2011 9:18 PM Cc: ‘Peter Shute’; birding-aus@vicnet.net.au
Greg,
It seems that ebooks will be a major path for publishers in the future. Unfortunately there are some 30 ebook formats available (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_readers ) fortunately, most handle the .epub and .pdf formats. All the file formats can be stored on a hard drive and loaded onto your ereader as required, though most readers have a pretty good capacity. The reader I use, Kobo Touch, can hold some 1,000 books as is and if you use a memory card, up to 10,000 titles. Ebook files are as portable as any other digital file and can be emailed, carried in a thumb drive or burnt to disk.
The price of ebooks varies a great deal. I have seen some which are cheaper than a hard copy and some which are dearer than buying the same title from vendors such as Fishpond or Book Depository. The great advantage of ebooks is that there are so many free titles. I reckon I could keep myself in reading material for life, just by reading free titles. My education was quite lacking when it came to the classics. Now that I can obtain them for free, I intend to remedy that.
One of the great things about ebooks is that there are so many out of print titles and obscure titles becoming available on free sites such as the Gutenberg Project. This will be a boon for researchers relying on inter-library loans, as many libraries, including the National Library of Australia, are beginning to offer their holdings in ebook format.
With Sony announcing their developing a “roll-up” TV, I think that we will see some interesting developments in the near future for ebooks. Ebook readers have far less circuitry than a TV, so the future looks very interesting for ebooks.
Hope this answers your questions. I am by no means an expert on the subject, having only taken delivery of my Kobo at the end of November, but I surely like the idea.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
Carl
Can you please enlighten on how these ebooks work. They sound interesting but I have concerns. I am unlikely to buy an ereader of some sort if the ebooks are only marginally cheaper than or as expensive as a hard copy and if the ebooks cannot be stored safely somewhere on a hard drive, separate from the ereader. Can people move them around as a simple file, swap them etc by email?
Greg Little
Greg,
It seems that ebooks will be a major path for publishers in the future. Unfortunately there are some 30 ebook formats available (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_readers ) fortunately, most handle the .epub and .pdf formats. All the file formats can be stored on a hard drive and loaded onto your ereader as required, though most readers have a pretty good capacity. The reader I use, Kobo Touch, can hold some 1,000 books as is and if you use a memory card, up to 10,000 titles. Ebook files are as portable as any other digital file and can be emailed, carried in a thumb drive or burnt to disk.
The price of ebooks varies a great deal. I have seen some which are cheaper than a hard copy and some which are dearer than buying the same title from vendors such as Fishpond or Book Depository. The great advantage of ebooks is that there are so many free titles. I reckon I could keep myself in reading material for life, just by reading free titles. My education was quite lacking when it came to the classics. Now that I can obtain them for free, I intend to remedy that.
One of the great things about ebooks is that there are so many out of print titles and obscure titles becoming available on free sites such as the Gutenberg Project. This will be a boon for researchers relying on inter-library loans, as many libraries, including the National Library of Australia, are beginning to offer their holdings in ebook format.
With Sony announcing their developing a “roll-up” TV, I think that we will see some interesting developments in the near future for ebooks. Ebook readers have far less circuitry than a TV, so the future looks very interesting for ebooks.
Hope this answers your questions. I am by no means an expert on the subject, having only taken delivery of my Kobo at the end of November, but I surely like the idea.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
Carl
Can you please enlighten on how these ebooks work. They sound interesting but I have concerns. I am unlikely to buy an ereader of some sort if the ebooks are only marginally cheaper than or as expensive as a hard copy and if the ebooks cannot be stored safely somewhere on a hard drive, separate from the ereader. Can people move them around as a simple file, swap them etc by email?
Greg Little
Carl
Can you please enlighten on how these ebooks work. They sound interesting but I have concerns. I am unlikely to buy an ereader of some sort if the ebooks are only marginally cheaper than or as expensive as a hard copy and if the ebooks cannot be stored safely somewhere on a hard drive, separate from the ereader. Can people move them around as a simple file, swap them etc by email?
Greg Little
Peter, unfortunately I have not kept a list. Here are a few sites that offer free ebooks http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en http://www.digitalbookindex.com http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.mobileread.com/ This list of sites is by no means complete, I am finding new sites all the time. In the few weeks I have had my ereader, I have been more involved in an orgy of science fiction. Baen books, one of the main SF publishers has a great library of free books, and I have been working on downloading most of their free library.
There is an rapidly growing number of sites offering so many books (Project Gutenberg alone has some 36,000 titles) that finding what interests you entails a fair bit of dredging.
Have fun dredging.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
Carl, any chance of a list of bird related eBooks you’ve found that are free or cheap?
Peter Shute
Carl, any chance of a list of bird related eBooks you’ve found that are free or cheap?
Peter Shute