Dearauthor.com featured a recent post which I thought—combined with the comments—was an excellent tutorial on ebook formats. (Of course, it was mostly Greek to me—what the hell is DRM?—but still very informative.)
I’m in the midst of an ebook format change-up right now. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I had little or no interest in the ebook revolution. Then I downloaded Microsoft Reader to my desktop and bought .lit books because that was the only way I could read Jaci’s books at the time. Easy. Except I had zero interest in sitting at my computer desk to read. Then I got the iPaq and it was a simple matter to download Pocket Reader to it and I still bought .lit. Yay. Except it drove me freakin’ batty. Even on the smallest font, the words were huge. Scroll scroll scroll and scroll some more. (This might be specific to my iPaq—it’s the RZ1715—the bastard runt of the Pocket PC family. But it was cheap and has Word/Excel/Solitaire—and at least I could read ebooks, even if my thumb does get sore.)
Then, for some reason I can’t remember, I ended up putting MobiPocket on my iPaq. Never did anything with it. It’s not like I could read my bazillion .lit files with it, so I don’t know why it’s there.
Anyway, enter the laptop and the print galleys for Forever Again. I’d never really done much with ebooks in .pdf, but that’s how galleys came, and I really, really liked how it looked. So I bought my next ebooks in .pdf. Figured if nothing else I’d read them on my laptop. (I tried the Adobe reader thing for my iPaq once—it sucked and never worked right.) I didn’t take into consideration the fact that my sweet husband who bought me my laptop for Christmas, wanted to me to have everything I needed and so bought me the biggest, heaviest laptop they make. (Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but not by much.)
So now I can either read annoyingly giant text on my little iPaq or have my legs go to sleep reading the pretty .pdf.
Well, earlier this afternoon I was procrastinating checking the formatted author copies for 72 Hours, and I remembered I have MobiPocket on my iPaq. For grins I synched a .prc copy to it.
Wow! What a difference! I set it to the smallest font and I love it. In Microsoft Reader—9 lines. In MobiPocket—23 lines.
So now I have all these .lit and .pdf books, but I’m just going to be loving me some .prc from now on.
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:woot: Cool! :clap: I’m pretty set with my ebookwise to read my ebooks on, you can make the text larger or smaller, thicker lined or thinner lined. It works well for me, and I’ve found that Samhain has the Reb format, though I still buy the .html in case I want to read a book off my PC. : ) :dance:
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I think I’m going to make it my mission to comment on blog entries with the word insanity in ’em. LOL.
But PRC is also what I use, because I use a Palm, so LIT doesn’t work for me.
Nicole at BlogHappy just switched over too.
The Creator software will allow you to switch over the books that are in unlocked PDF files–export as text only, save as HTML and create.
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I love ebooks. I’m visually impaired so with the advent of ebooks a whole new world of reading material became available to me on my computer. No more waiting around and hoping the books I wanted to read would get recorded either by the libraryof congress or for purchase. Then came drm (digital rights management) that copy protects ebooks and prevents piracy — supposedly. What it also does is prevent me from being able to *read* a copy protected book using my screen reader software. So, ebooks yay! Drm sucks the big one.
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lol hey, I haven’t COMPLETELY switched over.
Actually, it’s probably that the pdf files have more lines per screen that I like it so much. Don’t have to click the button to switch screens as many times as with the LIT books.
but I don’t quite get the Creator comment. With the Mobipocket Reader, it just converted the pdfs right there, no other software needed that I could see. I never downloaded Creator. And never had to convert the pdfs to html beforehand.
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I wandered over here from PBW’s blog and tripped on this entry. Sounds like you have exactly the same ebook woes I do. I’m definitely going to have to check into Mobipocket.