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a new source for your booksOct 02 '00 Write an essay on this topic.Since the begining of the internet (even before "the WEB"), you could have found on it books you could download. The most known of these projects was the Guttenberg project, which took upon itself a mission to turn any book it could (This applied mainly to books with no copyright issues) into Digital media... They had all those classics - the full King james bible, The complete writings of Shakespeare, JR Lewis (Alice in wonderland), And many more such jems... All these books where saved in compressed zip files, and where free to the public. In my opinion this already showed a trend which was going to grow as more people connected online and looked for content, but for a long time this was all there was. Not long ago, there began a big noise about eBooks, a piece of hardware which could be used as a book, downloading material for it from the internet. This was a novel technology, the idea was to create a platform that would be ideal for reading digital books, Microsoft developed a technology that would display fonts clearly on low resolutions, and everybody was thrilled... The main problem with the eBook idea was the fact that it's another appliance that you have to carry with you (in addition to your cell-phone, beeper, organizer, music player etc...) The problem I think is obvious. The ideal appliance would combine all these capablities. And along came the PDA's....... Now I encountered a new web site called www.FictionWise.com it's the fisrt I see that uses this concept for Palms... It distributes digital books for money by famous Sci-Fi authors (apparently this genere is more open to these ideas) like Gregory Benford. Most of the books on the site are dirt cheap (under 1$). This allows you to try out new writers with very little to lose (a normal new paperback costs 6$)... A great feature they add is MicroPay, since the prices for the books are so low, sometimes the transaction fee (Credit Card processing fee) costs more than the book, So FictionWise gives you the option to pre-charge your credit card and then deduct from that any amount (even 1 cent). Since now you can read on your Palm (or any other PDA) this digital books comes in the popular doc format so you don't need any special software to read it. In my opinion this is the way to go. I already bought some books at www.FictionWise.com and enjoyed the experience, everything is very straight forward and easy to do! Read your books everywhere! the revolution has began!  |
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