For a library for the price of a book, visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
If you just want to read and if you have a large screen, use your browser and under View increase the type size to meet your taste. If you just want to read and you have a small screen, try using WordPad or Word.
If you want to take notes while you read, first save the file on your hard drive, then open it in WordPad or Word, enter your notes with the text (making them distinctive with bold or italic or by enclosing them in brackets] as you go along), and save the entire file, with those changes, when you are done.
Once you are reading a book, you can use the Find function in your browser or word processor to quickly find any word or phrase in that book. When you stop reading, you can jot down the last phrase (a unique set of words) so you can search for that the next time you want to read and easily find the spot where you left off.
Because I can make the type whatever size I please, I can read these books without glasses and I read them about 50% faster than traditional print books.
So this approach to publishing makes books inexpensive and easy to read. It also enables the publisher to avoid having to deal with the costs and hassles of inventory -- you just make new copies when new orders come in.
Seems like a natural. But there's very little market for such books today; and mainstream publishers aren't paying any attention to opportunities of this kind. Rather, they are worrying over new encryption and display systems and gadgets designed for doing nothing but reading books. They put lots of energy into formatting and reformatting their texts time and again for different platforms, rather than focusing on creating new books and marketing the ones that they have.
Last week, I, too, got tempted by the proliferation of ebook formats. I had recently -- insanely -- typed in all 1300 pages of Mercy Warren's little-known history of the American Revolution. It was written shortly after the war and first published in 1805, and was only available in the old typography, with s's that look like f's and other peculiarities that make it very difficult for a modern eye to read, and impossible to scan automatically. I thought the book was worthwhile and should be read, so I entered it by hand, modernizing the spelling and punctuation and making other minor changes for readability. I posted the whole thing on my Web site, for free, and also made it available for sale on a CD ROM. Much to my surprise, a fan of Mercy Warren's contacted me and offered, for free, to convert the text to formats for palm devices as well as for Microsoft's PocketPC. The next thing I knew, I was playing with formats that I had never heard of before and experimenting with ebook markets that I had never known existed.
In just a couple hours, my new-found friend, Christopher Coulter, provided me with a zip file that included the full 1300-page book in Palm Document Database (.pdb), TomeRaider (.tr), and Microsoft Reader (.lit) formats. I have a Palm V (which I hadn't used in over a year); so I immediately fetched Palm Reader software from www.palm.com and checked how it looked when divided into 4042 tiny pages. Then I downloaded the free Microsoft Reader from Microsoft and saw in simulation mode on my PC what the PocketPC version would look like -- very very slick, on a big screen, but still nowhere near as good as plain text on a CD.
Next, at Christopher's suggestion, I checked out two major PDA sites -- www.palmgear.com and www.handango.com. Within a couple of hours, I had listed palm and PocketPC versions of Mercy Warren's book for sale for $5 at both those sites. Customers buy through the PalmGear and Handango stores (with the usual shopping cart mechanism) and then immediately download the files that they have bought. PalmGear and Handango take a cut of every sale, but beyond listing your items, you don't have to do anything. It looks like a great idea. And there are some pieces of software and even ebooks that seem to be doing quite well at both sites. (They show how many downloads there have been of each item to date.)
Then I remembered that another friend, David Gilford, had converted my book The Lizard of Oz to another format -- iSilo -- which is readable on a palm device. So I submitted that to PalmGear and Handango as well -- also with a $5 price.
In the first week, I made only one sale. If and when sales pick up, I'll be tempted to learn about more ebook formats, and download the necessary software and figure out how to do the conversions myself.
In the meantime, I'm going to relax and continue reading the Memoirs
of Casanova on my World Literature CD ROM.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
For a library for the price of a book, visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
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