The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
My wife is a very heavy reader. She easily goes through several books each week. She reads quickly and has no problem finishing up a constant stream of new stuff. Over the last year or so, though, most of the books she buys are stored on the hard drive of her laptop instead of on our bookshelves, as she has been buying ebooks. Ebooks are just that, books that you can buy online, download and then read on your computer. Generally, ebooks are cheaper than the same book in a paper version as the publishers don't need to pay for all of the costs associated with paper books like paper, binding and printing. To top it off, there are thousands of books that you can find online that are absolutely free. The main advantages of ebooks are price and size. A single CD can hold upwards of 500 books, saving you a lot of storage space and weight. Anyone who is a reader and has moved more a few times knows the difficulty of moving all of those heavy boxes up and down your stairway. The largest ebookstore online is ebooks.com. Housing thousands of titles, you can download a free reader, give them your credit card number and begin downloading titles. The reader is a small program that will only open the files of these books. They allow you to save bookmarks and significant places in books that you might want to go back to. They also save your page so that when you want to resume reading your book after you have earlier closed it, you will begin at the page where you left off. Titles But thousands of titles are also online for free. Project Gutenberg is the world's largest repository of out-of-copyright print materials. Everything from famous speeches, poems, and novels are available for download for free at their website. The disadvantage of these books is that most are either just Word documents or PDF files. That means they cannot be bookmarked or saved. You always need to know where you are when you reopen your book. Ebooks took a significant step forward last week when Amazon introduced Kindle, its ebook reader. Kindle is a small device, a little larger than a paperback, that is just a book reader. It has a bright, flat screen and a few buttons on the bottom that allow you to scroll through your pages. Kindle works wirelessly but off of the signal that cell phones use, not regular wireless Internet access, allowing you to download material in most places. Currently over 90,000 books, newspapers and blogs are available and more are being added each day. Ebooks have been around for a while, but Kindle attempts to address some of the downfalls they have had in the past. The screen is a type of display that makes it as easy to read as paper. No more glare and sore eyes from reading off of a computer screen. The device is also very thin and light, deliberately about the size of a paperback book, allowing you to retain the same experience as reading an actual book. A lot of people like to curl up with a book, not that many with their computer; this is what Kindle is attempting to change. Available in the US only for the next few weeks for $399, Kindle may change our idea of what an ebook reader is. Amazon is attempting to change the market, similar to what Apple did with iTunes for podcasting. When a major player moves into the market, it can really change things. It gives a new technology support and makes more people take notice of it. While ebooks have been around for some time, cheap, easy-to-use readers will take them a lot further. Something to watch. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
