Sony Ebook Reader or a book shelf of half a million plus…

I recently picked up a new gig in Portland at just about the same time as my Kindle died.  With the death of my Kindle I was looking for a new ebook reader.  The kindle2 was out but I really liked the specs on the KindleDX.  Problem was the DX was not going to be out for a while.  To aggravate the situation I now have a 45 minute commute into town on the train. 

Now don’t get me wrong, the train is a great way to go.  No traffic and I get some exercise walking back and forth to the train station (2 miles a day).   The problem is a 45 minute ride leaves me bored to tears.  My lifestyle is such that I no longer want to collect a ton of hardcover or paper back books.  I have over 5000 of these in storage in Idaho and don’t need anymore. The kindle worked great for me because all my books were digital and I could carry them around in my hand.  

I really wanted the DX, but those are all on back order and anyone who knows me knows I hate waiting for toys.  I decided to get a Sony PR700 series ebook reader for the short term.  I will still probably get a DX so I can read the Wall Street Journal on the way to work and because it is easier to read my PDF’s on.

I have started to collect a lot of ebooks and wanted to switch to a standard format that I keep my main library in.  I have standardized on the epub format because it is a open standard that has no DRM.  This means I can easily play with books in that format using .NET since an epub is simply a zip file containg a standard set of files a content in html.  These files include:

1. A xml file containing the bibliographic data for the publication (title, author, publisher, etc…) in Dublin Core format
2. A xml file containing the table of contents
3. The contents of the publication in a series of html files

So it is easy to build up a collection of EPUB files that are self contained and highly compressed.  The entire Gutenberg collection of 28000+ epub books takes less then 11 gig of space.  In addition, with Sony you have access to the entire Google library of over half a million public domain books (all in epub format).    I should stress here that it does not require a Sony reader to access this library. 

OReilly is publishing their books in EPub, PDF and mobi (Kindle) format.  So if you want to read Programming WCF Services on your Kindle, Sony or even IPhone it is easy enough to do. 

Finally the relevance to the title above.  You can download any of Google’s Library of EPUB books easily without owning a Sony reader (say you want to read them with Stanza on your IPHONE).  To do this:

1. Download the Sony Reader from http://ebookstore.sony.com/google-ebooks/
2. Register with the site
3. Click on the Unearth a Classic link on the far right
4. Search Google books for books of interest
5. Download those you want

You may also get free science fictions in EPUB/Stanza format from Baen books, and there are other source all over the net.  Almost all of Project Gutenberg is now available in EPUB format.  I will be posting a mass downloading utility for Gutenburg in a later post that allows you to download all 38,000 plus epub books from project Gutenburg. 

So there you go.  EBooks have more then arrived, they have over run the competition :-).  Believe me my 40K+ ebook collection is much more portable then my 5000 book collection was (and is easier to search).

The only drawback I have discovered so far is no EBook reader on the market today can handle the collection I have acquired.  So like any good developer I am writing my own.  More to come on that later.

Darrel