Amazon’s Kindle 2 makes it easy to download a variety of books, but bibliophiles can find reading material in other ways.
Amazon.com Inc.’s new Kindle 2 has created a huge public splash — and not undeservedly. The $359 device offers a thin, portable, easy way to purchase and read books, magazines and other documents — especially for those who have never been all that comfortable with technology but are eager to make sure they have the latest and sexiest tech toys in their personal arsenal.
There are a lot of e-books out there, and you don’t have to own a Kindle to read them. You can purchase them or download them free and legally — from sites that offer books that are in the public domain, from advertising- or subscription-based sites that offer original literature, or from authors who are offering free samples of their work in the hope that you’ll buy more.
Project Gutenberg
The great-granddaddy of e-book sources, this site is beloved by many of us who have been reading books on-screen almost as long as there has been an Internet. Started by Michael Hart as part of a student project in 1971 and rapidly expanded throughout the 1990s and beyond, Project Gutenberg now offers free access to thousands of e-books in a wide variety of text and audio formats, including plain text, HTML, PDF, Ogg Vorbis, Apple iTunes Audiobook and Plucker. Project Gutenberg also represents a less commercial side of the Web — it operates largely via the work of volunteers, who either submit the scanned documents or proofread them (comparing the scanned page image with the text produced by optical character recognition).
Fictionwise
There are a lot of places to purchase e-books out there. It offers books in a variety of formats (such as MobiPocket) that work with relatively obscure devices and because it advertises free short stories and, occasionally, novels as a come-on for bibliophiles who want to try new authors.
Google Book Search
Google Inc. got into a bit of a wrangle with the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and some other organizations when it first started scanning books into its database. Google felt it was publishing them online under "fair use." The organizations disagreed. They came to an agreement in October 2008, and now Google is offering three types of books on its site: those that are in print and in copyright, which can be previewed and purchased; those that are in copyright but out of print, which can also be previewed and purchased; and those that are out of copyright, which can be downloaded and read for free. Google has an advantage over many other book sites — for one thing, it’s Google, and so is a known and popular place for a lot of Web surfers. It also offers nicely formatted and readable images of the original books (rather than unillustrated texts). And it’s portable — owners of iPhones or other wireless mobile devices can navigate to the mobile version and find reading material that way. Finally, there are quite a few free public-domain books available — you can either read a scan of the original online, download a PDF or get a text version that can then be saved to a separate file.
Original online literature
If you aren’t necessarily looking for something that’s already available in print, there’s a wide and interesting variety of original fiction out there. There are people who publish their otherwise-unpublishable fiction on their own Web sites; and about online magazines that solicit and make available short stories and other fiction by both known and unknown authors.
Farrago’s Wainscot
There are a large number of them out there; what you find depends largely on what you’re looking for like science fiction/fantasy stories. There are several samples in that genre. They include Strange Horizons, a professional-level speculative fiction magazine; Farrago’s Wainscot, a compendium of weird tales; and Clarkesworld, which features some of today’s best new authors. And there are loads more.
You like mysteries? Poetry? Horror? Straight literature? Google around — they’re there.
Dedicated e-book readers such as the Kindle 2 and Sony Corp.’s Reader Digital Book are highly useful and getting more and more popular daily. It’s very likely, in fact, that these readers will soon become a normal part of most households, together with cell phones and computers.
But until then, those of us who don’t want to pay for — or, perhaps, carry around — yet one more digital device can use our current mobile tech to have all the reading material we want. We just have to look a bit harder.
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