EBOOKS :) SOMETHING TO SHARE!!

ebooks free classics to download and enjoy

Posted on December 8, 2006, 9:52 pm by cipher27 under Cool Stuff

The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, a popular Sci-Fi novel features a compact portable device which can be used to access all kinds of facts regarding anything in the known universe at the touch a of a button. Ever since 1978 this Sci-Fi story long the fantasy of geeks everywhere is now science fact. The entire Wikipedia site an collaborative encyclopedia can now be stored in an 512MB card for use with portable hand held devices, With WiFi enable devices and the growing penetration of Wireless broadband that day is not far off when the group knowledge of the entire Internet is at your fingertips. In a world when everything is going digital it was inevitable that plain old books would go digital too. The humble book which has not changed for centuries is undergoing a quite transformation and in its new avatar is more manageable,affordable and portable. Imagine owning the entire works of Shakespeare comprising of about 38 plays and 154 sonnets which used to fill shelves in a musty old library can now fit in your pocket. Every issue of National Geographic Magazine from 1888 to December 2000 a total of 1,285 magazines is now available as a set of CDs no bigger then a stack of 5 NGC magazines.

Digitization of books began as a necessary out growth of the human need for organizing the knowledge available in the form of books in a more easily accessible and search able from. The first ebooks to appear on the net were in the form of manuals provided for operation of computer software and utilities. The need to have instant access to literature fueled the digitization of textbooks and then to the digitization of novels and other works of literature.ebooks allow one to interactively search, bookmark & annotate while reading thus providing the reader with a very easy way to maintain and track information.

Under the US patent system all patents on literary works are to be renewed periodically if any literary patent is not renewed then the work is automatically available under the public domain,thus many of the worlds classic literature is now available under the public domain.The Gutenberg project which was founded by Michael Hart in 1971 continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. Gutenberg has an online library consisting of nearly 20,000 ebooks available in several formats including Plain text,>Doc and other formats. Over two million ebooks are downloaded from Gutenberg site this should give you a measure of the growing popularity of ebooks. Gutenberg’s Online catalog can be accessed online here. several sites today emulate Gutenberg and provide ebooks for downloads. A natural extension of ebook’s popularity is audio books, books that are read by humans or machines which are available for download and which can be played on portable MP3 players. The growing popularity of handheld computing devices like Palms, iPaqs and other PDAs and the growing popularity of smart phones has fueled the growth and popularity of ebooks and audio books.today several software exist which can be used to download and display ebooks from the net.ebooks are available in a variety of formats chief of which is the portable document format (PDF) and the LIT format from Microsoft.

How to find and download ebooks

Apart from Gutenberg several other sites provide ebooks in a variety of formats both for computers and handheld devices, a list of such sites is given below.

• The Open library provides a list of scanned books that can be read online.
• A collection of Grimms fairy tales is available here .*
• The Free library also provides many classics that are in the public domain.
• Authorama is another source of public domain books.*

* some of these online content can be converted into a variety of formats with the tools mentioned later on in this article.

ebooks in LIT and PDB formats for PocketPC and Plam respectively can be found at Memoware.com.

Fans of horror can find works by accomplished writers as well as budding writers at Horrormasters, books are available in both Palm (PDB) and PDF formats.

How to find and Audio Books

A lot of sites offer many literary classics in the form of audio books, these are usually in the form of MP3 files which can be downloaded to an MP3 player.a few sites that provide MP3 files of classics are listed below

• Thoughtaudio carries several classics as well as contemporary works in MP3 format.
• LibriVox is another site which provides audio books of classic English literature.
  

A lot of software is available to convert existing ebooks in word or any other format into either PDF or palm readable files. The best software for conversion of plain text files and DOC files to PDF is open office, you just need to open a word, HTML document or DOC file in open office and save it as PDF by clicking on the PDF icon. If you want to extract the contents of a LIT file you own and convert it to a palm or PDF file you can download Convert LIT and use it extract the contents of a LIT file and save it as HTML.

another way of converting documents to palm readable files involve a program called TLPDB which save files in the Palm readable PDB format. if you are budding writer you can use the above tools to distribute your work for free or charge for it. If you decide to charge for it then services like E-junkie allow you to provide secure download the user. Another service which prints and ships a book to the user is available at lulu.com


ebook readers
Now that you have downloaded ebooks how do you read them? Most plain text files can be opened in the WordPad or Notepad while HTML files can be read within the browsers like FireFox or Internet explorer. ebooks can also be downloaded and printed as long as he license requirements are met. PDF files can be either opened in the latest Adobe Reader or you can use the lightweight Foxit reader. Microsoft Reader can be used to read LIT files both on desktops and on Pocket PCs. The MobiPocket reader is an integrated software suite which can be used to manage ebook on the desktop and then transfer them onto handheld devices for reading.

A variety of software is options are available for reading ebooks on Palm devices, some of these softwares are listed below

• Plucker
• Weasel reader
  
• Acrobat reader for Palm
  
• eReader

If you want to purchase the latest t books from authors like Dan Brown the author of Da Vinci code you can visit sites such as eReader to purchase the books at an discounted price as there is no printing, binding or distribution costs involved so the publisher is able to pass on the savings to the buyer when they purchase these ebooks.

The Rising popularity of ebooks has caught the attention of several companies and companies like Sony and Philips are focused on developing devices that can provide a near real time feel to ebooks with the development of ePaper and other related technologies.