Bet You Already Read Them!    

e-Books? Bet You Already Read Them!

by Brenna Lyons

What’s that? You don’t think so? Well, if you use a computer, it’s likely that you do, at least for business, if not for pleasure.

Have you gone to the IRS site...or the DMV/RMV site? What about a medical or legal site? All of those “publications” and “articles” you download/read from the site are e-books.

Have you gone to the local public transportation site and looked at route maps and bus/train schedules?

Have you been given schematics of a tool by the company rep to aid in your repairs? e-Books!

Have you gone to a site and read a short story or poem? e-Book, just posted on the web instead of downloaded in PDF.

Have you opened the help file in software like WORD or Adobe to learn how to do something? You’ve read an e-book.

If you’ve done any of those things, you know how easy downloading and reading an e-book is.

You say you don’t know anything about the formats e-books come in? I bet you know that, too! Even if you don’t own equipment that reads Mobi or Hie... Even if you don’t know a thing about LIT, a format read by the free download MSReader, you certainly know other formats.

The three most popular e-book formats at the moment are PDF, LIT and HTML. I’ll bet PDF, read by Adobe Acrobat, and HTML/HTM, read on WORD or any browser software in existence, sound awfully familiar to you.

You say you don’t own any hardware that will read e-books? Or that you don’t want to sit at the desk to read? Not a problem. Despite some ill-informed articles in several major newspapers in the past few months, there is a huge selection of machines that can display e-books. There are:

• Dedicated handheld readers. These readers do nothing but read e-books. They don’t play music or games, hold your address book or any of the other functions a PDA does. These are good for children and adults who just want a reader and have no interest in the bells and whistles of an entire system. The ebookwise, the most popular of these currently sold, sells for $120.



• PDAs (Personal Data Assistants). These handheld units will allow the reader to do much more than read e-books. It usually holds your address book and schedule, e-books, pictures, music, games, database and word processing programs, calculator and many other programs of use. Authors often use the PDA to do edits on while they run errands or ride the train to a day job. The more basic units sell for as little as $100, and the more expensive ones for as much as $350. One of the most popular at the moment is the Palm Tungsten E2, which sells for $199, but the truth is that just about every major computer company has a PDA available for sale now.



• Smart Phones. Smart Phones are, simply put, cell phones capable of performing most of the functions of a PDA, including reading e-books. They have a large color screen in the handset that facilitates this. Some of the best-known makers of Smart Phones are Windows Mobile and Palm. The average Smart Phone costs about $300-$350.



• Tablet PCs and mini-Tablets. These are two of the hottest new pieces of portable computer equipment, and like the PDA, everyone seems to be making them. With a screen much larger than any PDA on the market, the only down side is the price tag to match. Many tablet PCs run $1500 to $2000.



• Laptop computers. That’s right. A computer is a computer is a computer. If you have a tablet PC or laptop for work, you can use it to read e-books as well. Why not? Chances are, you have all of the software you need already loaded on it. Consider for a moment the reduction in luggage you’d see if you carried e-books on a business trip instead of paper books.



• Desktop PC. Well, if you’re going to be there anyway, you can certainly read books on it!



• Cable PC. That’s right...not cable TV but PC on your television screen. While you have to be selective in what companies you buy from to enjoy reading direct on the TV, it is possible to do so.

Still think you’ve never read an e-book? It’s highly unlikely that you haven’t. In fact, you probably do it all the time and don’t realize it.

In fact, you’ve been training yourself how easy reading an e-book really is. If you’ve ever bought from an online store, e-bay or Amazon, you know how easy searching for what you want and buying it online is. If you’ve ever read a transit or zoo map online or found the instructions for an IRS form online, you know how easy it is to open and read on the computer.

If you’ve ever made a bookmark on your computer browser or clicked on the nav bar to look at your history of sites recently visited to find one again, you understand that you can bookmark your place in an e-book. In fact, many units do it automatically for you when you turn it off or when it times out and turns itself off.

If you already own a handheld, Smart Phone or tablet/laptop, you already know how portable they are. In fact, you can carry a whole home library in your back pocket! In addition, you’re ahead of the game; you already own the hardware to read e-books on the go.

If you’ve ever burned old files to CD or backed up your hard drive, you know how easy it is to load old books onto a CD or zip drive to make room on the unit for more. In fact, if you buy from a site like Fictionwise, one that keeps a library stored for you, it’s easier than that. Welcome to the world of e-books. You’ve come in and made yourself at home so painlessly that you didn’t even realize you’d done it!

For more information on e-books, please visit www.epicauthors.com.

Brenna Lyons, president of EPIC, is a multi-published, best-selling and award-winning author. For more information on her, please visit her site at www.brennalyons.com.

Reprinted with permission of the author.