E-Books
IntroductionThe concept of E-Book is by no means new. Converting the text of books into electronic form for the convenience of storage, searching and retrieval is hardly a new and novel idea. However, only the advent of the hand-held computing devices makes e-books real competitors to their paper counterpart. Needless to say, the easiness for storage, transfer, and searching is the biggest advantage of the e-books over the traditional books. That's the advantage of bits over the atoms. On the other hand, the paper books are easier to read, feel much better in the hands of nostalgia bookworms. The Rocket EBook looks pretty much like a traditional book, however, it is just a little expensive. Formats of E-BooksThere are several formats of e-books. The most versatile and easiest format is the simple ASCII files. Project Gutenberg is the typical example. No computing platforms cannot read the plain ASCII files, that's a huge advantage. You never need to worry you cannot read such kind of e-books. However, the biggest problem of the simple text files is the lack of aesthetic elements of traditional books. You don't have pictures in text files, you don't have the beautiful fonts, you lost the pleasant margins, you even lost the place to put your beautiful bookmarks! PDF format solved this problem on the cost of simplicity and versatility. Now you have almost the same appearance of traditional books, only not being able to touch and turn the pages. Another problem of text files is that you cannot protect the copyright of the books. Once the book has been transformed into text files, you can duplicate, transfer, modify without effort. That's bad for the copyrighted works. That's why Project Gutenberg only has the Public Domain works. Rocket Ebook seems solved the copyright problem, also on the cost of simplicity and versatility. To read a Rocket E-book, you must have a Rocket Ebook reader, a hand-held computing device rather similar to the ordinary PDAs, just without the other functionalities of PDAs. It is dedicated to read ebooks. The text is much more easy to read on a ebook reader than PDAs, however, I doult this can justify the high price tag. Reading E-books on PalmsThe doc format is the de facto standard for e-books for the Palm computing platforms. There are a dozen doc readers for Palm, you can find most of them in PalmGear. I am using SmartDoc on my Palm III. SmartDoc is not only a doc reader, but also a doc editor. You can write notes or memos longer than 4KB using SmartDoc. That's a workaround for the notorious memopad 4KB limit. There are a number of websites you can download the doc format e-books for the Palm. For such websites, see my bookmarks page. If you failed to find an e-book in doc format, but you can find the book you want in Project Gutenberg in ASCII format, you can convert the text file into doc format according to my tip. If you are using a Windows machine, use QEX to convert the ASCII format into doc format.
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