Reading novels on my Pre

One of my favourite apps is pReader. It allows me to read ebooks., and it's free. I hadn't been paying attention to the whole ebook trend. A couple months ago was reading a book by John Ringo - Dance With the Devil, when I found myself getting a little confused. I had picked it up as a quick read, thinking it was a complete story - it made no mention of other books - but I quickly realized I was missing a lot of backstory. I punched "John Ringo" into (the universal search on) my phone and tapped the wikipedia symbol and quickly brought up his bibliography. And found out it was book three. All three book listings had links to free online versions, which I clicked and downloaded from the Baen Free Library. They had palm-specific (webOS) formats. From there a quick search on the Free Apps App and I had a reader. Haven't turned a page since. It's also pretty cool that I can sit on a bench at night in a park (when it is still too hot to be inside) and not need a light, and have music on.

Make Use Of is a great website that offers help and advice on a very wide range of topics, focussing on computers and the internet. This last week they had an article on eBooks - 3 Good Online Sources For Free EBooks - which talks about a number of options for reading novels electronically. It actually mentions 4 places to get books. Project Gutenberg, manybooks, Google Books as well as Baen Books and their free ebook library for science fiction. 

Here are a few more useful links from Make use of. 

The Best 6 Sites to Get Free Ebooks

4 Sites with LOTS Of Completely Free Ebooks That Don’t Suck
E-Books (complete category)

Calibre - essential app for organizing, storing and reformatting all your books across all formats. 

Because of pReader I no longer carry (and occasionally lose) paper books around - which is something I used to always do. I was synonymous with books, in fact some people know me as "BookRob" (since many people know a lot of Robs). I also now keep a much closer eye on my battery level and I am very diligent in keeping it charged. When my phone dies I am get kinda grumpy and fidgety. I really hate having nothing to read. So I make sure it never happens.