But, in the meantime, I thought I’d point out how I go about actually reading ebooks rather than just aquiring them. I’ll start with the reading software, and work back to ebook formats.

μBook

If you want to read ebooks comfortably then (in my opinion) μBook the best choice, and the only software you should need. It has support for the most formats, runs on Windows, Pocket PC and now has a ‘lite’ Palm version (Sorry no *nix/OSX – any alternative suggestions in the comments?). It’s not free, but at $15 US I think it is worth it.

In my experience, the main differentiating factor with ebook software is support for formats. Microsoft Reader and eReader only appear to support their own, proprietary formats, which are normally DRMed. Does this seem silly to you? An ebook reader prorgam that cannot even open a text file for reading? Crazy.

Mobipocket has support for a few more formats, such as RTF, HTML and TXT, but μBook has support for many more:

• Renders .TXT, .RTF, .HTML, .PML, .PDB and .PRC (Non-Secure), files book-like.
• Extracts text out of .PDF (Non-Secure) files.
• Displays PRC, RTF and HTML images, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, .WMF (in RTF) or .BMP.
• Opens text inside .ZIP, .CHM and .RB files, uncompressing paragraphs on the fly, limiting the amount of memory required (except CHM).

It’s that last point that seems most important to me. I think ebooks should be in the most open format that can support all the features required. To me, that would probably be HTML, but with multiple pages, images and style sheets you can end up with a few files per ebook. Μbook (Μ is a capital μ) allows you to zip them up so they can be in a single file.

So, anyway, on to ebook formats.

Ebook Formats

First off the bat, Adobe PDF (as an ebook format) is evil. Very evil. No good unless you want to read them on a screen that is at least as big a sheet of paper. I normally read ebooks on my Pocket PC or my Tablet PC so I need my ebooks to be in a format that can be read on any size screen, and PDF does not cut it in this regard. I normally use Adobe Acrobat to convert the PDFs to something more useful, normally RTF or text. If the PDF is locked so I cannot save it as something else then I don’t read it – too much trouble.

If I’m buying an ebook from somewhere online, like Fictionwise, I normally get (unsecure, DRM-free) Palm Doc (pdb) or Mobipocket (prc) versions, as they work well in uBook.

If I’m getting some short fiction from the web somewhere, I normally try and find a ‘printer-friendly’ format and save the HTML file. If the story has important images, then I use Firefox’s ’save as -> web page, complete’ option to save the page to a folder, and zip that up.

One final suggestion if a website has too much junk around the fiction: Use the Scrapbook extension for firefox. It allows you to save a selection to a file, including all the images.

To the future: OpenReader maybe? Sounds good, but so far its been mostly vaporware its been a long time coming – David’s comment below has details. I really think there needs to be a free and open standard in this space, and I hope it’s not too far away.

1. Baen Free Library – free – here you can get 80+ free full length books. This is intended to get you hooked so you’ll start paying by the month (see number 4).
2. Cory Doctorow – free – Cory has released all his recent stories and novels under Creative Commons licenses so you can download away. However, Cory is probably even more useful because he finds out when other authors do similar and lets everyone know through his blogging at Boing Boing, so keep an eye there.
3. Strange Horizons – no cost – “a weekly web-based magazine of and about speculative fiction”. Every week they have more fiction available, as well as articles, reviews, poetry and art. They don’t seem to have any syndication feeds, so I created one here.
4. Baen Webscriptions – $15 USD for 4+ full length books – If you’ve read all the books in the free library, every month Baen releases at least 4 full length books in copy-protection free goodness. There are usually a few new books, and a few re-released older books. They don’t have feeds either, so I created one for them too.
5. Fictionwise – cost varies – this online store has a large catalogue of ebooks available for download, with many reasonably priced. Just make sure you only get the multiformat books, as the secure formats are obviously DRM’d. I do like it that fictionwise at least allows you to easily select non-secure formats only.

One final option is to subscribe to my fiction del.icio.us feed, as I regularly bookmark any fiction I find so that I may come back and download it later.

Whatever you do, don’t buy DRM’d ebooks. You are just ripping yourself off in the long run.

Thanks to darahgna for the photo.

UPDATE: Boing Boing’s post brought in a lot of good comments and suggestions below. I don’t think I’m going to run out of fiction any time soon.

UPDATE II: I have written a post about how I read ebooks that might interest you.