Wow…
What a week. Longer than a week, actually. And it doesn’t look like it gets much easier for the rest of the month. Work’s been hell. Not hell as in my boss pulling his dick out at me or anything, but just from the sheer exhausting amount of it. Juggling multiple incompleted projects while my boss keeps deciding that it’s time to install them and put them live (when they’re not finished), thus making me look bad when they blow up (never mind that I tell him they’re still not finished)… I haven’t even had the energy to write on the Z. The Z’s been active, don’t get me wrong, but it’s mostly just been playing Ogg files and letting me read eBooks. Enough bitching about work. On to the eBooks. 
I love eBooks. Always have. Ever since the possibility of carrying around several full lenght books around on a single, pocketable electronic device became, well, a possibility, I wanted to do that. Unfortunately, many books simply don’t come out in any format other than dead tree, and most places that carry eBooks have a severely limited selection. Still, that hasn’t stopped enterprising souls from getting more than a few modern texts down on eBook format. Here’s a few sources for those of you looking to fetch a few eBooks of your own for your Palm, PocketPC, or Zaurus:
Project Gutenberg: PG is a non-profit volunteer-run system dedicated to making as many of the worlds most fmaous, important, and classic texts available in digital form. You’re not likely to find the latest Clancy thriller in here, but their selection includes many of humanity’s most important works, as well as a good selection of fine classics that anyone seeking to gain a little extra culture would be well-advised to check out. The Project Gutenberg books are free, and distributed in an unencrypted format, usually just plain old .txt files.
The Online Books Page: Celebrating 10 years of listing free books on the web, it features a fairly decent search engine. Once more, it’s mostly limited to texts that have passed into the public domain, so no Anne McCafrey, no Interview With The Vampire, no Celestine Prophecies. However, it’s a good place to start if you’re searching for a classic or even many lesser known texts and hoping there’s a free version online. Highly reccomended.
FictionWise: A commercial eBook vendor with a wide and impressive variety of both known and unknown authors, with contect ranging from fantasy and sci-fi to business and technical books. Their website is slick, and makes it easy to find new reading possibilities and suggestions based on your favorite genres. Pricing varies from very cheap ($0.25-$0.50) to about the same as you’d pay for a paperback version of the same book ($5.00-$20.00). Their selection is extensive and varied, and the quality of the books is excellent, as they are usually transcribed by professionals or provided directly from the publisher, as opposed to the often amateur or voluntary transcriptions on most free services. While pricing can seem steep for some books (it can be gallign to pay as much, or nearly as much as a dead tree version of a book for the digital version), it’s very much worth it if you’re an avid reader and enjoy reading more recent texts and authors.
Xenon: This one’s an oddity. First, it’s hard to find. It’s a part of FreeNet, and as such, beyond the reach of most non-technically inclined folks. I plan to post up a short tutorial on what FreeNet is, how to use it, and why you should be a part, later on, but for now suffice it to say that it’s a free, anonymous, encrypted and distributed network that runs parallel with the internet, based on a peer-to-peer infrastructure like Kazaa and other file sharing systems, but with much higher goals in mind. Anything published in FreeNet becomes impossible to take out, it stays there permanently so long as people keep requesting it. Content that’s not requested for a long time eventually dies out, while content that’s often requested spreads across the netowkr, becoming easier to find. Within FreeNet lies a freesite known as Xenon. It’s easy to find once you’re inside FreeNet, just look in ‘The Freenet Engine (TFE)’ and you’ll see it listed there. The author is patiently uploading scores of eBooks to FreeNet, completely free, and often illegaly, as many of the books are not licensed for digital distribution. Freenet’s anonymous nature prevents him from being found out, though. The selection of eBooks is heavily skewed towards fantasy and sci-fo, though there’s some other texts as well. Selection is limited tough to a couple dozen authors so far, as Xenon’s owner seems to be inserting the books by author in alphabetical order. So while you’ll find Alan Dean Foster’s Flinx series readily available, it will be a while before we’ll see Zelasny. Quality of the books varies wildly as well, as they are almost without exception amateur transcriptions or outright scan/OCR’s of the original books. However, if you have a loose conscience, or are simply looking for an electronic version for a book that you allready own in dead tree format, it might be worth giving Xenon a look-over. The site is growing slowly but steadily, with books being added at a faster pace than I, at least, can keep up with them.
Well, those are the main eBook avanues that I know of.. I’ll let you know more as I come across other distributors and sources.
