James Fallows of The Atlantic is the latest Kindle convert and tells here and here about his new love. This is good news for e-books, given his stature within journalism and among Washington policy wonks.
Besides commercial books like Netherland, he is already enjoying free public domain classics from Manybooks.net and Project Gutenberg. Perhaps he’ll also check out Feedbooks.com, which, like Manybooks, has K-format books ready to go.
I know Jim and will see if he might eventually write about e-book standards and related issues such as DRM. Just look what happened to cassette tapes. A similar fate someday for the Kindle format? May the K machine soon be rendering ePub natively! For now, congratulations to Jim on his new purchase.
Related—for Jim and the rest of us: 100 addictive e-book sites linking to "more than 1,000,000 free books and stories" (found via Matthew St. Amand and Mike Cane). Nice list. But where’s the Feedbooks site? Or mention of major commercial sites like Fictionwise? The page also contains a link to 100 Must-Read Books. I’d love to see public librarians get serious about compiling similar lists of both commercial and public domain e-books, especially the latter. For now, most libraries play down public domain titles that you can download and keep. No evil conspiracies are at work here; unshackled books just are not on public librarians’ radar. Kudos to Jim for making them part of his Kindle adventures.
