A couple of days ago, someone suggested David write a retrospective about the different e-reading devices he had used through the years. It seemed like a marvelous idea to me, and there certainly is room for more than one such article. So here is mine. 1. Palm IIIe I had long wanted a Palm Pilot, ever since reading articles in Salon Magazine and elsewhere about how cool it was to read books on them. Finally, with the 2-megabyte Palm IIIe being particularly cheap, I took the plunge and bought one in August, 1999. Also in...

One idea that libraries have been experimenting with for a while is lending a collection of e-books under the same kind of restrictions as paper books—no more than one patron using a given "copy" at one time, each copy being "returned" after a set checkout period. (For a while, eReader was owned by a company that offered e-book lending collections to libraries.) I have learned that both Fictionwise and my local public library now offer e-book lending collections—Fictionwise through its Libwise division, and my library through Overdrive. Today, I decided to take a look at both e-libraries and see...

Note: This letter will be printed out and mailed to Random House as soon as I am satisfied with it (and can find out to whom it should be directed). Any suggestions for improvement will be appreciated. Customer Service Random House Inc. 1745 Broadway New York, NY 10019-4305 Dear Random House Customer Service: Provoked by Packaging I am writing to express my extreme displeasure with one of your products: The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl, which I recently purchased as a Fictionwise e-book. I am not upset with the content of the book, as I have not yet read it. I am...

Thanks to Chris for such a useful post. Let's see more articles like this---I can't do both news and in-depth tips constantly. Meanwhile Alan Wallcraft says Mobipocket will also run under Garnet, but not with DRM capabilities. - D.R. Today I looked at a Palm emulator for my Nokia 770, with the intent of using it to run an eReader client. My overall verdict: mixed, but promising. The screenshots were captured using VNC from my Windows box. Click on them to see larger views. Going (Pea)nuts about ebooks It started with a problem. My first PDA, way back in the late '90s, was a Palm...

How big a screen do you need to read E, especially e-books, and what does this mean in the escalating Kindle-vs.-iPhone debate? The larger-display faction: My wife, a baby boomer like me, favors big fonts. When Carly is in the mood for an e-book, she hates the idea of reading off a PDA-sized screen such as the iPhone's. The UberReview feels likewise. And some older people in publishing seem much more focused on the Kindle than on PDA-type gizmos and cellphones as a saviors of E. What's more, certain eye doctors and librarians correctly think of  Kindle-type machines...

Hmm. Maybe Nokia has things a bit backwards. Business should be unlearning DRM, so that I can read best-sellers on my Nokia 770....

How to live with Adobe PDF on small-screen devices like the Asus Eee PC? Can you tweak the software so the view is more booklike---using the portrait mode---hen you hold the Eee as shown in the photo below? And what about the far-more usable, as I see it, FBReader? Geeks.com has come up with a handy little guide with tips, including how to rote and adjust the margins in FBReader. Would that the DMCA not exist---so people in the States could convert files from DRMed formats to enjoy with FBReader! In fairness...

I'm no true prognosticator, but I think we can see the outline of the next generation of e-readers now. Like Sophie, it can be programmed by an author. Like FBReader and Lector, it will be open platform and accept many formats. And it will be built on a 'prairielight' framework....

My daughter is in from San Francisco for Thanksgiving and she brought "The Road by Cormac McCarthy and insisted I read it before she leaves on Monday. Well, the book was a paper one and so I embarked on the task. The reason I mention this is that I've just spent quite a while reading books solely on the Sony Reader, so reading The Road was an abrupt change and so makes for an easy contrast. I noticed the following things: I didn't mind the contrast difference between the pbook and the Sony Reader screen - this surprised me because the pbook...

With a free Garnet Virtual Machine running on the Nokia Internet Tablets (the original 770 as well as the currently available N800 and N810), all Palm OS applications can run on high-resolution screens. Including e-book software with DRMed e-books....

As hot as E Ink gimzos are right now, many e-book-lovers prefer PDAs and other devices, such as iPhones, that they can use for purposes besides reading. Web browsing, for example. Over at DearAuthor, Jane concludes a three-part series with a discussion of PDAs and the rest---with mentions of favorites like the Palm TX (photo), the Nokia 770 and the IPAQ 211. Part I was the Intro; part II, an overview of E Ink devices and other devices intended just for e-books. Detail: E-book apps on the iPhone are rather problematic for the nontechnical right now, because of Apple's closed...

Writing the post below got me thinking about whether I should be upgrading my e-book reader. Here are my current thoughts on the subject. I currently own an original Sony Reader and a Nokia 770 and 800. Since I'm using my iPhone I don't consider my Treo to be a reader any longer, and there is no real reader for the iPhone, so that is out of consideration. The 770 and 800 are nice units, but are rather kludgey when used with FBReader. I guess the Sony has spoiled me. I would really like to upgrade the Sony because...