Use Your PDA as a Book Library
Store and Read a Variety of E-Books on your Handheld Device
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 (PDA’s) 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.
Many of the modern e-book viewers offer a range of options which make it easy for a view to read the e-books – 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.
E-books are relatively small in size in comparison to the large storage capacities of modern PDA’s – particularly those with expansion disks. PDA’s 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.
There is also a huge range of e-books available for owners of PDA’s to enjoy. No longer are there just obscure or out of copyright titles available – or tacky e-books 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 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 e-book in the online shopping cart. Another well known provider of e-books is eReader who also supply a free reader program for your PDA and desktop. Read more about eReader at this Suite101 article.
The prices of e-books varies. There are many free e-books available on the internet – particularly as mentioned above, out of copyright books which are now freely available and within the public domain. 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 e-book 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!
For other great things to do with your PDA read this Suite101 article here.
