A New Reading Paradigm – The eBook.

I love reading and I love books. Luckily, I have a beautiful leather bound set of Britannica which provides a beautiful sensory experience when browsing the pages. Nothing can beat the smell of the leather or the feel of the paper. Bookworms will, I’m sure, appreciate my point.

My wife is less of a bookworm. I don’t mean she doesn’t like to read but she drew the line when she started tripping over large piles of Tom Clancy novels. At that point (late 2000) I began experimenting with e-books on a monochrome screen PDA with books from what was then a subsidiary of Palm Inc.

Software is available now for most PDAs and phones. Novels are widely available but originate in two main formats .prc files from Mobipocket.com and .pdb files from eReader.com. Mobipocket is now owned by Amazon, so it will likely become the defacto standard in time. For leisure reading the benefits are obvious – you can carry an entire library in your pocket and save room on your shelves for true ‘sensory experience’ books.

There are also a range of sources such as eBooks.com providing technical material in PDF format. This includes a wide range of medical texts but reading them on a PDA or mobile phone is next to impossible. You can read them on a laptop screen, but this will eventually cause some discomfort and eye strain. Fortunately there is an answer to this in the form of ePaper ebook readers on the way. Next month I will review a couple of the available ePaper readers … see you then.