For the sake of simplicity, I will assume that your reader is able to read ePub and PDF files and supports the Adobe Digital Editions DRM for both formats. Most readers can however be reprogrammed to support Mobi files, however, but I personally suggest to stick with ePub.

Free e-books

Free e-books are usually classic works whose copyright has expired, and are therefore in the public domain. Without delving into deep the deeper meaning of this, the practical effect is that they can be freely republished and spread. It should be noted, however, that different countries have different copyright regulations, and it may very well be that a specific work is in the public domain in one country but still under copyright in another. Care should be taken not to infringe the local regulation.

Most books written over a hundred years ago are in the public domain, and many of them can be found in ePub format. While Project Gutenberg has an experimental ePub output format, its internals are still based on simple text files that contain the whole book as a single, uninterrupted flow. This can be acceptable, but there are better options out there.

Enter Feedbooks, my personal favorite. With thousands of books at the time of writing, there is something for everybody. The site is split in two sections: public domain and original books. Many of the ones in the public domain are actually imported from Project Gutenberg and fixed to take advantage of the unique features of real e-books: table of contents, clear chapter marking, and so on. If you are going for classics, look no further. Original books, on the other hand, are recent books made available for free by their authors. Indeed, Feedbooks also doubles as an online self-publishing platform for writers. There are some gems hiding in there, so don’t dismiss the idea of reading stuff by unknown authors!

Another interesting source is Manybooks, which carries many books also carried by Feedbooks, but also adds some from other sources.

Using unencrypted e-books is as simple as dragging and dropping the .epub files onto the memory of the e-book reader, or using a specific software such as Calibre. I will not review the latter, though, as there are many other websites explaining how it works in great detail.

Paid e-books

More recent books, such as Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” (or Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight”, if you are that kind of person) are — obviously — not available for free.

There are many online stores online that carry e-books in many formats, and that is a good thing, because you can sometimes find different prices. The downside is that, even if you have a favorite bookstore, you may still have to hunt around to find one that will be able to sell what you are looking for. Publishers, unfortunately, are stuck in the “regional limitation” paradigm: just like you can’t watch an European DVD in an American DVD player (unless you force it), you can’t purchase e-books targeted at a given area of the world if you are in another. In the case of e-books, this is even more frustrating than dealing with DVDs, because there is no artificial technical limitation. The difficulty is in getting hold of the file itself, since the issue arises during the check-out process.

That said, once you purchase an ePub with Adobe Digital Editions DRM (from now on: ADE), or a PDF with ADE, you will be presented with a very small .acsm file. The Adobe Digital Editions software — which you will have to have already installed and configured at that point — will open it and proceed to download the actual books and decrypt it. It will then be able to upload it to your actual e-book reader, if you have previously authorized it from within the ADE application.

My favorite e-book store is, without a shadow of a doubt, eBookPie. In addition to having a bunch of e-books of all kinds (with many being added daily), the site’s interface is very sleek and easy to navigate. Unlike many competitors, one distinguishing feature is the ability to limit search queries — or any other book listing, for that matter — by device or format.

My e-book reader, for instance, can open ePubs and PDF files, both encrypted and unencrypted. I can choose “Sony Reader” from the “Narrow by” dropdown box (it can read the same formats as the Cybook Opus), and I will not be presented with books that I wouldn’t be able to read. That’s more useful than it may seem, because most publishers are still getting the hang of electronic distribution and might only have their materials in formats that won’t work with your equipment.

It should be noted that “Adobe Digital Editions” and “Adobe ePub” are two different beasts: the former is a PDF file encrypted with ADE, while the latter is an ePub file encrypted with ADE. If possible, go for the latter. PDFs are not reflowable, and it may be slightly more difficult to read them without having to navigate actual pages. ePub files, on the other hand, are reflowable and your reader will build the pages itself, without forcing you to see half-pages or other monstrosities like that. In my experience, though, e-books in PDF format tend to have smaller pages than the full-fledged A4 or Letter paper sizes, so it’s not that bad. Not as good as ePubs, though.

There is, however, one reason that makes eBookPie stand out and crush the competition like an elephant does with an anthill. (I really hope PETA doesn’t come after this for such a comparison.) The reason is simple: outstanding, top-notch support.

When I first tried purchasing an e-book from eBookPie, on Friday night last week, I had some issues with the check-out process. I sent an email to tech support, asking whether it was indeed possible to buy files from Italy. Less than half an hour later, a very kind reply came from Ms. Jill Tomich, who asked me to provide additional information about the problem. This led to an exchange of messages back and forth, and the problem was ultimately fixed the next morning. Note that all of this happened between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning their time, and the whole exchange was extremely friendly. I have said in my previous post that Bookeen’s support was incredibly good, and that was true. eBookPie‘s support, however, is a million times better. I was utterly amazed by how much care an employee gave to a new customer who was just trying to buy a $1.66 e-book (yes, that’s one dollar and sixty-six cents). Now imagine my surprise when I noticed that Ms. Jill Tomich is not any employee: she is the co-founder and CEO of eBookPie. The CEO. Taking my $1.66 purchase so seriously that she followed up with me on a Saturday morning. She even sent me a discount coupon as a way to apologize for the trouble. She rocks, and the company she co-founded will grow huge.

See, it may appear that I am easily amazed, but in this case it’s absolutely worth it. Here in Italy, customers are seldom taken care of, and certainly not in such a friendly way and by someone at such a high level in a company. You are generally just another wallet to squeeze, and aggressive marketing has replaced customer care entirely. It’s all about quantity, not quality; so who cares if someone is disappointed and leaves? With companies such as Bookeen, and especially eBookPie, the approach is completely difference: you end up being so satisfied that you go back to purchase from them and you tell everybody else that they are great. That’s why I have made every single occurrence of the name eBookPie a link: they absolutely deserve it. Trust me, they are great!

Oh, and did I mention that they carry over 250,000 titles? Two hundred fifty thousand titles. Yep. You’d better be a cat, because one lifetime just won’t be enough to read them all.

In one of the following posts I will talk about a peculiar use of e-book readers: interactivity.

1. They are not backlit, therefore you need ambient light to see what’s on them
2. They do not require power to keep the image up
3. Their refresh rate is abysmal
4. They do not yet come in color, and they’re quite lame at showing gray too

So, you may wonder, why even consider buying something like this? That’s very simple: the things I mentioned above are the points of strength of these devices, not their weaknesses: it’s all about what you use these screens for. I am going to briefly go through those perveiced problems.

No backlight means no eye strain, period. You do indeed need ambient light for the screen to be readable, but then again you don’t read a book in the dark, do you?

The lack of backlight and the technology used also means that the battery life is extremely long: the batteries are only used momentarily when the screen is redrawn; in other words, the device is sleeping while you read a page, and only wakes up to turn the page. That’s why e-book readers’ battery life is commonly measured in thousands of pages, rather than in hours of operation.

E-ink screens, however, require a full refresh of the page (white → black → white → draw the text) to change the page, in order to avoid an effect called “ghosting,” which causes a hint of the previous page to vaguely persist. This problem, the lack of color, and the bare ability to go beyond a handful of shades of gray means that video won’t come to this technology before 2013 or so.

However, these devices are just great for reading standard books, such as novels. They are lightweight, long-lasting, clear and crisp, and the books themselves are usually very tiny in size: most of them barely reach one megabyte in size, and most devices have at least 1 GB of internal memory.

For more details about the technology itself, please read the page on Wikipedia. It comes with pretty pictures.

If you haven’t watched the video, don’t bother doing so: anything I said in it will be covered here.

The Opus is an e-book reader based on e-ink technology. I will write about the technology in another post. For now, let’s focus on the Opus.

Quickly skimming through the specifications shows that this device has a 5-inchscreen capable of displaying 4 shades of gray (yes, four) with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels and a density of 200 dots per inch. It has a 5-way controller, plus 2 buttons to turn the pages, plus one button to open a contextual menu and one generic “back” button. The battery is rated for 8,000 pages, there is a built-in accelerometer to automatically redraw the page should you turn the unit to any other side, and it has a microSD slot if you really feel like taking even more books with you. A slightly improved version was very recently released, with a better accelerometer, a barely more powerful battery, and a colored case. And it’s cheap as hell: I paid it €199, shipment and taxes included.

The box contains all you need to use it: a white USB A–miniA cable, a protective pouch in fake leather, a short introductory manual. The unit can be recharged via USB, so there is no need for an external unit. If needs be, though, you can use any power adapter with a USB socket.

Turning it on, you are faced with the beauty of the screen: it really feels like paper. The backpanel is just slightly darker than a regular sheet of paper, and more closely resembles the color of a newspaper. Other than that, you will fall in love immediately. The navigation system is very easy to learn, and shouldn’t pose much of a problem. My unit came preloaded with a bunch of books in several languages, both full classic novels and “demo” versions of current books.

One of the first thing that you may want to do is upgrading the firmware. My unit came with version 1.9, but Bookeen has released 2.0. Upgrading is simple: just download the file from bookeen.com, copy it onto a microSD card, put the card in the Opus, switch it on, and press and keep the central button when the logo appears. After a few seconds, the screen flashes and the flashing process begins. The books on the unit are kept safe, so there is no need for a backup. (Note for Mac users: make sure you the microSD has a MBR partition map and a FAT32 partition. I wasted a good five minutes wondering why the Opus didn’t recognize my card.)

When the device is connected to a computer, it appears as a standard storage device, as if it were a thumb drive. Unprotected files can be simply copied through drag and drop into the appropriate folders, or you can use specific programs such as Calibre or Adobe Digital Editions. More on them in a subsequent post.

The Opus (and its bigger brother, the Gen3) are widely praised in the e-book field because they seem to be the only ones to offer a ridiculously wide choice of font sizes. Whereas other readers are limited to four or five, these devices let you choose among 12 sizes, ranging from “where is my magnifying glass?” to “share the book with your neighbor.” There is no way one wouldn’t be able to find a comfortable size. It is also possible to load TrueType fonts onto the internal memory, and use those to display the text. The default font is Palatino, but I am a Georgia fan and I was quickly in reading heaven.

If the book you’re reading has a TOC, the Opus will let you jump to any section with just a couple of button presses. Of course, you can always to go any specific page, whether a TOC exists or not. And if the flashing refresh bothers you, you can disable it. In that case, however, you will have to deal with some ghosting; it’s not bad, but I personally find that after ten pages or so it can make the screen look a bit cluttered.

You can also read PDF files, but they won’t be reflowed and you may have to scroll around the pages given the size of the screen. It is annoying, but being able to open such files can still be quite useful. Besides, it wouldn’t be much better on any other similarly-sized device.

With all these customization options, reading with the Opus is a very pleasant activity. I was originally torn between the Opus and the bigger Gen3, but I am extremely glad I went for the former. The Gen3 has a 6-inch screen, but its resolution is the same. This means that the density and sharpness is smaller, and even though that may not matter much — and some swear that the physically bigger screen is invaluable —, I like how the Opus feels in my hand. Moreover, I wouldn’t have any use for the Gen3’s MP3 capabilities.

The Opus is a great and cheap way to join the e-book reader revolution. After just a few hours of use, it felt completely natural and I had the impression of having used it for years. E-ink is clearly going to be developed much more in the future, but the technology is already more than usable for standard reading. Indeed, I’ll go as far as saying that the iPad may be a great thing for many things, but the Opus’ simplicity and elegance easily beats any iBook application. And your eyes do not feel any strain whatsoever, even after long reading sessions: a few nights ago I found myself losing track of time when reading a book written by a friend of mine. That never happened to me when using Stanza on the iPhone: my eyes didn’t take long to remind me that I had been reading for half an hour.

I have to add one last thing: Bookeen’s PR department was extremely gracious. I emailed them to ask some details about the upcoming colored Opus, and that turned into a small but profitable exchange of messages. They had absolutely no problem telling me what exactly would be different in the new models, and also answered a few questions I had about the distribution in Italy. While their replies were not immediate (the whole exchange happened over the course of two days and a half), they were very kind in taking the time to address the doubts of what was then a potential, not-yet-secured customer. Merci beaucoup, Bookeen!

In the upcoming posts, I will describe how to find books to read. If you have any questions, leave a comment!

Photos

Hover on any picture to read a short description.

Head to the video page on Youtube and enjoy. If you can stand my accent, that is.