A Beginner's Guide to E-Books

In the final year, e-books take started taking off in a big fashion. E-books have been around for a long time, of course, simply a few events in the last yr suggest that they're really starting to get traction as a viable culling to paper-based reading. One is the success of due east-books like Leo Babauta'south Zen to Done (read my review). Another is the emergence of e-book-simply publishing concerns and widespread cocky-publishing made possible past the availability of cheap tools and widespread Internet access. The third is the release of viable due east-book readers, especially the Kindle.

Another sign of the success of e-books, though, is non such a happy one: the huge overabundance of poorly written, scammy, second- and tertiary-charge per unit e-books that has of a sudden started flooding the market. As with music and video, the Internet has made publishing and distributing books like shooting fish in a barrel and next to free, and it tin be hard to find anything worth reading.

Even so, there's some gems out at that place if you know where to look. For those of you who are just discovering e-books, or are ready to take another expect, I offering this bones guide to finding and reading e-books, with a few tips and tricks thrown in.

Due east-Book Formats

There are dozens of different formats out at that place, all intended for different devices and platforms. Hither's a quick overview of the about popular ones:

• PDF: Adobe's Portable Document Format is the leading format for e-books, since it can perfectly simulate the advent of the printed page.
• LIT: Microsoft's LIT format is used by Microsoft Reader, available for Windows-based PCs and mobile devices. LIT files look nice, but are frequently re-create-protected and have express functionality.
• MOBI: A portable document format created by Mobipocket (which runs on Windows PCs and just about every kind of smartphone or PDA), MOBI picked upwards steam recently when it was adopted, albeit in a slightly modified form, by the Kindle.
• Evidently Text (txt) and HTML: Standard file types that tin be used by just about every device known. TXT files lack any formatting.

How to Notice E-Books

There are thousands, maybe millions, of sites offer east-books on the Net, simply here are a few proficient ones:

• Amazon: Of course Amazon has e-books, with just about any contempo mainstream book for sale. Your favorite online retailer probably carries e-books, too.
• Project Gutenberg: Millions of costless, public domain books, by and large available in text and HTML formats. Includes but about whatever archetype book you can remember of from before 1923, and a few more contempo books.
• Wowio: Beautifully formatted books, including some fairly recent mainstream books, all free.
• The Internet Archive: The Internet Annal is scanning books in libraries around the earth and making them available for gratuitous in a range of formats, including searchable PDFs of the original page images. They have about half-a-1000000 texts so far, and counting.
• Baen Complimentary Library: A pioneer in the due east-book field, Baen makes selected titles from information technology's line of scientific discipline fiction and fantasy books available for free download. Lots of skillful stuff for SF fans!
• Free-eBooks.internet: A huge directory of free e-books, near of which are self-published. Yous'll have to do some digging to find quality stuff here, merely there are plenty of good books to be found with some patience.
• Spider web Warrior Tools: Founded by two of the stars of the personal productivity blogosphere, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and Glen Stansberry of LifeDev, Web Warrior Tools offers a drove of books devoted to topics like amend email, podcasting, and other Lifehack-y subjects.
• Memoware: Memoware includes tens of thousands of public domain books, formatted for a wide range of portable devices. They likewise take a premium bookstore where more electric current, mainstream books can exist bought.
• Fictionwise: A huge e-book bookstore, specializing in SF, with titles formatted for a range of devices. Check out their always-changing option of costless e-books drawn from their collection.

How to Read E-Books

Nobody has figured out a way to read that adequately replaces the way nosotros read traditional paper books, but that isn't always important — and some solutions come pretty close! There are a number of ways to read due east-books:

• On your computer screen: This is probably the to the lowest degree preferred way to read due east-books. But it's fine for short pieces — yous read on the Internet at your calculator, right? It's too fine for quickly looking at reference material like an encyclopedia or calculator manual.
• PDA/smartphone/iPhone: I've read dozens of books on my sometime Palm IIIe, when I lived in New York and took the subway a lot. iPhones are supposed to be particularly nice to read on. Most PDAs and smartphones come with some kind of pre-installed e-book reader, or y'all tin can easily download Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, or a range of other programs depending on your device's operating system.
• Dedicated devices: New devices with "electronic ink" engineering come very shut to reproducing the advent of printed text on newspaper pages (although the background is closer to "pulp fiction gray" than "first edition white"). There are several devices on the marketplace, merely the leaders are:
  • The Kindle: With congenital-in wireless Internet to download books on the fly and the back up of Amazon'south extensive inventory of e-books, the Kindle was a surprise hit — especially considering how ugly it is!
  • The Sony eReader: Amend looking than the Kindle, simply lacking the wireless Internet. Both devices use basically the same screen and price about the same. Because the east-ink technology used in the screen only uses electricity to change the screen (east.grand. to turn pages), battery life on both devices is quite loftier — unless you lot employ the born mp3 player or the Kindle's wireless Internet services.
• Paper: I oft print out longer works that I don't want to read on a screen, peculiarly if information technology's likely I'll be property onto and re-reading it. Save paper by using your printer's "multiple pages per sheet" part and printing on both sides; I also keep a ream of newspaper with pre-drilled holes handy and so I can stick printed out books straight into a binder.

E-books tin be quite applied — there's a universe of great literature, history, science, how-to, and reference material available at a moment'due south notice, often for gratuitous. What could exist wrong with that?

If yous know of other sites where good e-books can be found, if yous have a favorite manner to read due east-books that I haven't listed here, or if there's a program y'all specially similar, let usa know in the comments!

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/a-beginners-guide-to-e-books.html