the ebook world

I’ve read a few books on my iphone touch recently, using Stanza, which is free from the apps store. I’ve focussed on out of copyright books from gutenburg.org (a very interesting project to epublish out of print books and make them available for free). I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis, because my son told me he had read it as a teenager and was very enthusiastic, and followed that with The Trial, which is one of those uncanny books that reads as very contemporary.

And I’ve read Flatland; A romance of many dimensions by Edwin A Abbot, which is about a land in two dimensions; am dipping into Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Montaigne’s Essays, and have some Herodotus, Homer and Dostoevsky waiting in the wings.

I still really prefer to read books as books, but the carry-around aspect of the ipod is a winner and it is easy to read and use. It works splendidly for print, but Stanza does not cope with pictures of any kind, so seems best for fiction and poetry.

I have not yet bought an epublished book. I still buy books on paper. However, I am now selling one. There’s a process for doing it for free at Smashwords.com and I’ve converted my final word file in accordance with their instructions, which took a couple of days, and submitted it. Search its title - Take It Easy - on the Smashwords site if you want to check it out. It costs $5.96 USD to buy it as an electronic version. You can choose what format you download it in, everything from html and pdf to epub and a whole lot of others. I don’t know anyone who would want to read a novel on their computer, and there’s nothing much in the way of an ebook reader on the market in NZ except for the ipod touch/iphone. If you happen to have an Amazon Kindle, I think you can download from Smashwords, but I’m not clear yet on that.

So now I’m going to read the Smashwords book on marketing. Don’t hold your breath.