Anybody here ever look at EBooks?
 

And I mean the book itself, not the file format.

And what have you found?

As somebody who has a shitload of books taking up physical space, and who usually requires 3 or 4 books to get through a business trip (depending on how long the plane ride is), I'm all set with the concept of a file I can take around that will not take up space at my house or add weight to my bag and be instantly searchable.

However, I've also found today's reading technologies suffer due to display quality, so, ehh, forget it, mostly. I have bought a couple for my Palm just to see how I liked it, and again, the display--just not good enough. When we have 300dpi electronic paper I have no doubt it will be a killer app!!

Having said that, for an interesting ebook business model, check out the Webscriptions at Baen Books (www.baen.com). There is a free section, and even in the paid section, most of the books have at least one chapter up for free so you can see if you feel like paying for it.

I was one of the half-dozen people who purchased an ebook reader from RCA (later sold to gemstar/tv guide.)

I loved mine. Then they killed it.

Never gave the poor format a decent chance.

I still prefer my Handspring Visor and reading software from mobipocket.com. They also have a freeware (for personal use) publisher to create e-books out of any text file, which opens up the entire Project Gutenburg library.

Between the free books from Baen, the free downloads from Mobipocket, and the generated texts from Gutenberg, I can build myself a nice library.

I've read a couple of books on my Handspring Prism, and I like it very much. Lots of good stuff out there for free in .txt format, and a large array of good reader programs. Mobipocket is indeed a very fine reader, but you do have to perform a simple conversion to be able to read .txt file stuff, but hey...it is still free.

I had looked into getting an Ebook (I think it was called the Rocket Ebook, but its name has changed). They used to be great. On the first versions, you were able to not just buy and download ebooks, but also import texts of your own into it Ebook's memory.

But then they crippled it by making new versions ONLY display books that you have bought from the company. The current versions have no capability for you to import any text of your own. So there goes reading the thousands of free gutenburg copyright free texts.

When it first came out, I was considering getting one. Now I absolutely will not.

I have four -- three REB-1100s (one of which has a busted screen), one REB-1200. The REB-1100 is great. I've read most of the Baen catalog on it, plus the occasional entry from Fictionwise. If you don't like what's available from those sources, though, you're out of luck unless you go to the pirate groups.