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[meanwhile]

so i love the mediaf!re thread for getting new music, and i think it'd be great if there was one for ebooks as well.
i'm considering starting a similar thread with kindle-ready ones, is there any interest in that?

[Melodic]

no

[scarred]

yeah i don't want to be a hater but the kindle bugs the shit out of me. i just love books too much.

[Emaline]

yeah i don't want to be a hater but the kindle bugs the shit out of me. i just love books too much.

[Alex C]

It's a pretty decent idea but I think somebody tried getting ebooks rolling here and it didn't really take.

Personally, I like e-books. Probably because I own around 300+ books that frankly I'd rather burn than move again at this point.

[Zingoleb]

I don't really know much about e-books but I am a book whore. Can you just like...read them on your computer instead of on some stupid little device? I'd be fine with reading stuff on a computer monitor but a kindle would drive me crazy.

[ackblom12]

In all honesty, using a kindle is a pretty great experience for the most part. As someone who can't stand concentrated reading on a bright LCD the e-paper is pretty fantastic.

I'd be quite interested in the idea of a e-book thread but like Alex said, it's unlikely you'll get much help here. This board has a pretty great acceptance of practically everything media in digital form, but when it comes to books it's kind of like bringing a computer to a luddite convention.

Personally, I like e-books. Probably because I own around 300+ books that frankly I'd rather burn than move again at this point.

Yeah, I'm still trying to decide if I even want to take my books across the country when I move. I'm honestly considering donating 95% of them sometime next year before we do leave.

[meanwhile]

fair enough.

i didn't know how well i'd take to reading a kindle rather than a real book, but as long as an e-book is formatted decently i forget that i'm not reading a real one. i think i might actually like it better now.

I don't really know much about e-books but I am a book whore. Can you just like...read them on your computer instead of on some stupid little device? I'd be fine with reading stuff on a computer monitor but a kindle would drive me crazy.

yeah, there's a kindle app for mac/pc that lets you read em, probably some other ones too. but i agree with ackblom12, the e-ink is much nicer to stare at than a monitor.

[Alex C]

Yeah, I'm still trying to decide if I even want to take my books across the country when I move. I'm honestly considering donating 95% of them sometime next year before we do leave.

The worst thing is that I had finally unloaded most of my fiction when my oldest uncle died and left me just a ton of really cool biographies, art and history books. About 200 of them are hardcovers that I don't know where to put but don't really want to part with. But moving with them would suck.

[David_Dovey]

yeah i don't want to be a hater but the kindle bugs the shit out of me. i just love books too much.

It's lucky nobody is forcing you to use one and they are still making books, then!

I for one would absolutely love to have a Kindle, what with not even being able to fit my clothes in the (really quite ridiculously large) bag I am taking travelling with me, let alone a stack of books.

[Scandanavian War Machine]

I've been thinking more and more about getting a Kindle or some other comparable device lately. The price has gone down quite a bit, well into the "less than half a paycheck" safety zone, but still....I'm not ready for the future.

also, I'm moving into a new place soon and I don't really have the money to spare right now.

[J]

how about a nondevicespecific ebook thread?

[Blue Kitty]

I started thinking about this and I've been wondering, what file types do the e-readers use?

[JD]

PDF?

edit yup

[J]

depends on the device. most good ones will do .pdf, and i think just about all of them do .doc and .cbr (which is specifically for comic books). and then there are the various drm infested proprietary formats.

personally, unless you really need to have your reading material formatted all nicely with illustrations and fonts and the like, i'd just stick with .txt files as it saves space for more material, and does not limit what you can and cannot do with it.


as a resource, i'd like to offer everyone the following: www.gutenberg.org

[Liz]

Back in the day some dude posted a gmail account with ebooks to share, looks like it is still up.

Account name: qcforums
Password: pintsize

I have done my part.

[meanwhile]

thanks, there's some good stuff in that account.

yeah everything does pdf's, but since you can't resize them or there text i think they'd be pretty hard to read on the smaller version of the kindle. i was under the impression you couldn't resize text with plain .txt files either, but it turns out you can, so those are a good bet unless you want to make use of table of contents, for which i believe you need one of the identical amazon formats (.mobi, .azw, .prc) which come in the drm and non-drm flavors. one of the most popular ebook formats is .epub, which kindle doesn't support.
you can always convert stuff from one format to another with calibre (itunes for ebooks) but sometimes it turns out gross, especially converting from pdf.

a non-specific ebook thread would probably make more sense, but i've found lots of those and they're always book-dumps full of pdf's and epub's. i guess txt is pretty safe, i'm just disappointed the net seems to have agreed on pdf as the most efficient way to share books.

[JD]

these guys like to post comics every so often