New to my tablet PC and would like to find some

Benjamin · 01-24-2005, 03:01 PM

New to my tablet PC and would like to find some good ebook websites. I would love to find a good electronic anatomy book.

Thanks

Steve S · 01-24-2005, 03:08 PM

I use fictionwise.com. It's OK, but I find e-books to generally be overpriced compared to conventional books...

liquidblaze · 01-24-2005, 07:52 PM

fictionwise as well.

I prefer ms reader, eventhough you only got 6+1 activations.

I'm still wondering if there is any other software that can read .lit files though

newst · 01-24-2005, 10:26 PM

Unfortunately the big guys (Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc.) have recently left the ebook market, leaving the market to smaller specialty sites (fictionwise, Baen Books, ebooks.com) and the classic libraries like Project Gutenberg.

PocketPCthoughts.com has an ebook forum where you can find references to many other sources.

Personally I'm eager to see how Google intends to provide access to the books in those big university libraries.

WillAdams · 01-25-2005, 12:46 AM

It seeems that Google will ``merely'' be indexing these books, and that when one gets a search hit to one, you'll get a link to the book listing in the source library --- whether or no they'll make the whole thing accessible is another issue altogether.

Unfortunately, one can pass off a bundle of page images w/ uncorrected OCR text as an ebook these days, so there's a lot of chaff....

Still sort of on-topic---there's an interesting new e-book reader program:

http://rivertext.com/sophie.html

That last has a nifty annotation feature, which unfortunately is
notebook, not book-centric (try it, you'll see what I mean). The
bundled texts are a strange lot (conspiracy theorists may enjoy them
though). The UI requires more scrolling than I'd prefer too, but for
the price it's hard to complain.

William

KenMagel · 01-25-2005, 01:51 AM

Until the publishers understand the advantages they could have with electronic books, the ebooks will be priced about the same as paper books. Publishers need to provide ebooks or the option for a resaler such as Amazon or Barnes and Noble to create ebooks that are at least $10 cheaper than the corresponding physical book. Given that the publisher saves on production and distribution costs, this should be doable with everyone still making the profit per book they make now.

KenMagel · 01-25-2005, 01:55 AM

Until ebooks become cheaper than the corresponding physical book, I would like to see publishers experiment with enclosing CD-ROMS or DVDs of their books in the books themselves with the DVD or CD-ROM perhaps asking for some random information from the physical book itself to permit installation on a computer. Maybe the CD-ROM or DVD could only allow two or three copies to be made.

This would be really useful with textbooks.

liquidblaze · 01-25-2005, 02:13 AM

ken, the check you propose reminds me of the check that was in place with old DOS games.

however, this would again lead to own formats since I dont see this being incorporated into the currently available formats.

what would be great is a kind of partnership with big ebook sellers, where you can enter a code you find in your book (one time, not time limited though)and where you download the book in a format of your choosing.

WillAdams · 01-25-2005, 05:43 AM

Actually, there are a few sites which do have ebooks available for less than the printed books.

Other times one gets an ebook version ``for free'' on CD-ROM w/ a printed text.

For my part, I'm curious as to the software used to make games for DVDs and whether or no that could be adapted to ebooks to be read on portable DVD players and TVs.

William