As they have for the last few years, e-Reader.com is offering free e-books at the rate of one a day for your joyeous season’s glee. Just head to their site, click on the big banner at the top, and download away for your reading pleasure.
But they’re only doing it for four days this year, the 18th to the 21st. I seem to remember their December giveaways lasted 12 days last year, and the entire month of December in 2004. What happened? Publishers uncooperative? Run out of public domain works? A friend of mine referred me to “gift horse, not looking into the mouth of,” but I’m curious. eReader.com, where’s the love?
Fortunately plenty of e-books are freely available elsewhere, from Project Gutenberg and Baen Books’ Free Library to the Web sites of the authors themselves. You may, of course, wonder why anyone would bother. I pity you.
E-books have brought a huge change to my reading habits, which were already pretty excessive. For over 30 years now I’ve read roughly four or five books a week, barring acts of God, spousal pleading, or medically necessary periods of unconsciousness. People in the office are used to me walking the halls lost in fiction and they cheerfully try to trip me in the stairwell in a playful manner.
What kept my habit within reasonable limits wasn’t the cost. I re-read favorite books quite often and used bookstores treat me the way a car salesman treats a lottery winner. It was the burden. Carrying more than one book at a time gets tricky without luggage or servants so I constantly had to avoid finishing too soon for fear of leaving myself adrift with – gasp! – nothing to read. This may sound trivial to you, but I assure you that heroin addicts aren’t as careful with their doses as I was.
Then I bought a Palm Pilot and discovered e-books, which has been the literary equivalent of dropping an addict into a barrel of the stuff.
An e-book is simply an electronic document you can read on your computer or portable device. Reading this way isn’t for everyone and there are plenty of times when I still prefer the solid feel of a physical book, especially when there are mosquitoes around, but the advantages of e-books are undeniable.
Right now, my handheld has over 100 books on it and that’s only because I wanted to leave room for music. Now if I get tired of yet another childhood flashback in “The DaVinci Code,” I can jump over to a Chuck Palahniuk novel and continue happily along, as long as I don’t get the two plots confused.
I can carry around the entire works of Mark Twain if I so desire, and I do. I can add bookmarks without dog-earing the pages. Some reader programs allow you to underline passages or make notes. It is technically possible to dog-ear a Palm Pilot but you need a good pair of channel lock pliers and a metal-working vice.
By replacing some of my library with e-versions I’ve managed to empty almost a third of my room-sized, monolithic bookshelves and freed up space for…well, for the books that wouldn’t fit there before.
I can read dirty books and no one will know, unless I giggle.
E-books are usually cheaper than the print versions and are occasionally available faster. Baen.com also sells access to their e-books weeks before the printed version hits the shelves and by buying them electronically I can avoid having to deal with the other science-fiction fans in the aisles at Barnes and Noble. Some of those people are obsessive.
Thanks to the backlit screen I can read in total darkness. I could even use the light from my e-book to read a printed book in the dark, but that would be just weird.
And, best of all, I can buy them whenever the insomniacal whim strikes me, without putting on any more pants than necessary.
OK, there are drawbacks. Paperbacks still work even if your battery runs low. Not all books are available in e-form, and some of them are as expensive as the hardback version. Asking an author to autograph your e-book just isn’t the same, somehow. You don’t get that wonderful moldy, rotting-paper smell of a good used bookstore. And e-books are remarkably useless in propping up an uneven table leg.
But that’s not enough to keep me from my e-ddiction. Expect to see me walking along with my portable library, happy in my fictional world. I’ll be the one plummeting down the stairs.
eewwww they’re all romances today… eewwww
Another great and free resource is Daily Lit — classic public-domain works delivered to your e-mail inbox in easy-to-digest daily chapters that you can read in 5 minutes. It’s for people who can check email for an hour a day but can’t find time to pick up a book. Dailylit.com.