PDA as a Book Library, Store and Read Ebooks

New Technologies Make Reading Books on Handheld Devices Easy

Apr 16, 2007

If the thought of reading a book on a PDA conjures up images of squinting at a small screen displaying tiny barely legible text, it's time to take another look.

Modern handheld computers or personal digital assistants (PDAs) offer much more than just an address book service. The latest brightly lit screens with a high resolution and excellent quality color representation makes them an ideal way to read books. Whereas at one time reading e-books on a small screen would be an uncomfortable experience – today many people trying an e-book for the first time on a PDA, or taking another look after a number of years will be pleasantly surprised. Both Palm and PocketPC platforms are equally well catered for.

Ebook Viewers and Readers

Many of the modern PPC and Palm ebook viewers offer a range of options which make it easy for a view to read the ebooks – for instance choice of font size, auto-scrolling (where the screen slowly scrolls thus saving the reader the need to tap the screen to move it on a page) and even natty little facilities such as the ability to append notes to a page or add bookmarks.

Ebooks are relatively small in size in comparison to the large storage capacities of modern PDAs – particularly those with expansion disks. PDAs can be loaded up with many different e-books giving you the opportunity to while away the hours reading fiction, learning a language, catching up on current affairs etc – in fact to have access to a mobile library.

Buying Ebooks for PDAs

There is also a huge range of PDA ebooks. No longer are there just obscure or out of copyright titles available – or tacky ebooks offering to tell you how to make a million in three easy steps! Today there are a huge number of books available in e-book format – including many of the bestsellers.

Ebooks.com currently advertise the fact that they have over 80,000 e-books available on their website and these include best selling fiction, an extensive range of non fiction, and professional and academic titles. These books are all available for download in different reader formats, for instance Adobe Reader, Mobipocket, or Microsoft Reader. You simply choose your format when putting the ebook in the online shopping cart. Another well known provider of ebooks is eReader who also supply a free reader program for your PDA and desktop. For more information see this article - eReader

The prices of e-books varies. There are many free ebooks available on the internet, particularly as mentioned above, out of copyright books which are now freely available and within the public domain. These can be a great source of free ebooks for palms and other handhelds. Most of the best selling and modern titles are sold for similar costs to that of paper books. Sometimes a little less – but generally an ebook doesn’t present a great saving in the actual cost price. But where you do save is in delivery costs, and of course they are instantly available, no wait for delivery or the next trip into town.

Remember that copyright applies to e-books in exactly the same way as it does a paper book – therefore books protected under copyright are not allowed to be copied or distributed.

If this has inspired you to take another look at e-books then scan the internet and take a look at what is available – you may find yourself pleasantly surprised!

The copyright of the article PDA as a Book Library, Store and Read Ebooks in PDAs is owned by Kate Pullen. Permission to republish PDA as a Book Library, Store and Read Ebooks in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.