I love my traditional, paper, books as much as any other book lover does.  Holding a reading device while sitting in a confortable armchair doesn’t really equal sitting in the same chair with a nice, original, book in your hands… But… Let’s get real about it… We’re in a changing world.  There are too many of us, placing too much strain on our environment.  Our climate is changing and it doesn’t seem to be for the better.  Can we really justify the continued use of paper books when they are not necessary? Over the past four years I must have...

Sony announced the third new model of eBook Reader, this month. This new model has a larger screen, in addition to a built-in 3G modem and seems to be a direct competitor to the larger Kindle DX model. Sony’s products have an distinct advantage over the Kindle in the fact that they directly support Adobe Acrobat PDF files which can be directly loaded through memory cards or a USB connection. Sony also announced that it will be possible to borrow books from local public libraries in the US, for reading in the eReaders, with the book automatically expiring at the end of a 21-day loan...

Stanza seems to be a generally well regarded ebook reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. As it is available for both Windows and OS X, it attracted my attention. First I downloaded it on my MacBook but it is so minimalistic that it just seemed incomplete to me. As if development had been abruptly halted before the product was ready. As I ran into the snag that Baen sells some pre-release texts only in formats which are incompatible with the eReader software which I regularly used, I decided to give Stanza a chance again. I bought the books from Baen and started reading the first one of them. My...

Sony has released two new models of its Reader device. One of the new models is smaller with a 5 inch screen and is considered to be pocket model. This smaller model will cost $199, making it one of the cheapest alternatives for reading ebooks. Perhaps these new models can help Sony gain more traction in the market as it is currently in the shadow of Amazon’s Kindle. It would be interesting for Sony to gain more market share before Barnes and Noble starts offering a device of its own, next year. I hope to be able to see these devices first hand soon, but won’t hold my breath waiting for...

I’m currently right in the middle of the process of setting up an apartment for my family to move to, within this month. As I have a sizable collection of books, the question of how and where to store them came boiling up as I realized that while I’m moving to a larger apartment, it’s got no bookcases. This got me into thinking about my book reading and buying habits over the last few years. It seems that it wasn’t without reason that I decided to write about eBooks as the vast majority of the books I’ve read over the past four or five years where ebooks. The great...

Have you ever read a full book on your notebook? I’ve read many. A notebook certainly isn’t the best device for reading an eBook but will certainly do in a pinch. For many years I’d used a Palm IIIc or a Dell Axim X3 for reading eBooks. I was quite happy with these devices as book readers, apart from the fact that even with minimum brightness they sometimes still seemed too bright in a dark room. They, unfortunately, were getting old and began in one way or another to fail. I was looking into getting an iPhone, or an iPod Touch, but hadn’t made my mind to do so yet when both...

There are still a lot of people that haven’t yet tried listening to a book, instead of reading it. I was in pretty much that situation, up to a bit over a year ago. I had had very little contact with audio books, up until then. In fact, the only person I knew that was a regular consumer of audio books what a friend that has a slight vision impairment that makes it hard for him to read at night. It was by chance that I actually “read” my first audio book. I had been reading several books in a collection and when I got to the last one, it wasn’t available as an ebook and I...

One of the first things I did after I got an iPod Touch was to install eReader on it. Actually, it might have been the first application I installed, though I can’t be totally sure. I have been reading books electronically for a long time as I have always been a big believer that this is the inevitable future of books. I’ve read a lot of books on my PocketPC and on notebooks and now that I’ve got some on the iPod I feel we are getting closer to what I used to envision for this technology back in 1997. Back then I set out to create both an ebook reading and a creation software. I was...

Amazon introduced this week the Kindle DX. The new product is essentially a much larger version of the Kindle 2 with the capability of displaying native PDF files. You can expect that without the need to make the document fit on the smaller screen of the Kindle and still be readable the reading experience will be much better. Early pictures show great looking images of newspapers and we can expect that textbooks will be much more at home in this new device. In fact it seems that Amazon is specifically targetting newspapers and textbooks with this new device. This strategy makes a lot of sense to...

An article on Ars Technica called to my attention that Sony is making available books which have been scanned into PDF by Google, on its online store. These books have already been available directly from Google, but it seems that they get special formatting for the Sony Reader if downloaded from the store. Most of these books are texts from before 1920 and while some might be considered classics, others are just old and outdated. While we should welcome the preservation and availablity of all literary work, it is not clear if this will have any significant impact on the perceived value of the Sony...