eBook Fever

One of the things that interested me when I bought my HP Jornada was the concept of eBooks. Mind you, not that one of them would ever replace having a real live paper book in your hand, but--the concept of being able to carry around a collection of something to read in one small PDA was intriguing. I usually carry a book with me wherever I go in case I have car problems, have to wait for a prescription, etc. As I always have the Jornada with me, this would preclude having to carry a book much of the time.

The unit already came with a collection of eBooks, mostly classics, many which I hadn't read, some which I didn't care to read. The ones I had read before and liked, and the ones I hadn't read and wanted to look into, I downloaded from the CD-ROM. But I couldn't imagine actually buying one.

A few months ago I found the University of Virginia's eBook site. They have a collection of electronic documents that range from, again, old classics to documents about African-American history. They are downloadable for personal use. Indeed I did download.

When I purchased the Jornada, I also bought Don Hanttula's Pocket PC Handbook, which, as you can guess by the HP logo on the cover, is extremely Jornada-friendly. One of the pieces of additional software Hanttula recommended was "ReaderWorks," by Overdrive, which will turn a HTML, text, or Microslop Word 2000 file into a Microsoft Reader eBook.

While surfing Overdrive's site, I found the link to a Windows CE site that had a large collection of eBooks, including more that I wanted to read. Again, these are chiefly 18th-19th century books: Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Jane Austen, Arthur Conan Doyle, etc., and I can keep the texts in the PDA instead of borrowing the books from the library.

But the idea of the ReaderWork's software was intriguing. Since I was off for President's Day today, I booted up James' computer (I'm running Windows 95 and it only works on Win98 and upward) and downloaded ReaderWorks Standard, which is freeware. (The professional version allows you to add graphics to the text, index, and contents page.)

But what would I convert? In a bit of whimsy, I pulled up all the fanfiction I've written based on Rupert Holmes' delightful 1940s series Remember WENN, and, through trial and error, converted the pieces to two e-books (one for the short stories and one for the novel-length retro story, The Shell Pendant Mystery). It was a delightful experience! Maybe I'll go looking for books online that I haven't read and haven't been converted to HTML and "do the job."

(You may be amused to know I was using four computers for this process: my own to convert the files to an appropriate eBook form [nothing fancy; just a bit of tweaking and excising of unnecessary HTML code] and save them to floppy disk, James' computer with ReaderWorks to convert the files to a condensed .lit format and save to floppy disk, the laptop which is the computer synched to the PDA, and the PDA itself. Ain't computers fun?)

Incidentally, I'm thinking about buying my first eBook. EBookMall has Stephen Boyett's wonderful Ariel, long out of print, which has a new introduction and new material. Very, very tempting...

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 4:33:00 PM

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