eBook Reader Source

Displays and promotional materials at East Palo Alto Library, Summer 2008 Remember that place you went to once or twice as a kid. Yeah that place, the one with books, the kind of books that you get to take home for free. Yup, you guessed it, the public library. An often overlooked source of free media nowadays, public libraries have quietly transformed themselves into large digital media repositories. While your local public library might have a disappointing amount of physical books for you to browse their website may very well have a huge amount on offer.

Although I am currently living in Japan, I checked the Seattle Public Library’s website to see what was on offer there and was surprised at how much they have for people to download. They currently offer eBooks for checkout in Adobe eBook format and DRM Mobi Pocket format. Besides eBooks they also have music, audio books, and video on offer as well. The Seattle Public Library offers free eBooks through a variety of services that host the books and media files. These services are:

netLibrary- An online library of eBooks and music. “They offer Cliffs Notes, The Complete Idiot’s Guide series and a collection of Pacific Northwest titles” among others.
Safari Books Online- “Access digital books on computing, databases, programming, Web design and more. The collection includes over 1,000 titles for the three most current years from publishers such as O’Reilly, Addison Wesley, Que and Sam’s Publishing. These digital books can be read while you are online.”
OverDrive- “Download audiobooks, ebooks, music and video that can be listened to or viewed on your computer or transferred to a portable device. Many titles can also be burned to a CD. There are never overdue books or late fees - titles automatically return to the Library’s collection after 21 days.”

You will have to check with your own library to see what service they offer eBooks and other media through.

One important thing to note is that not all eBook Readers support protected (DRM) Mobi and PDF files. The Kindle in particular won’t allow you to play these but a person has come up with a way to change Mobi Pocket files so that they work on the Kindle. The link below is to my other post on how to read protected Mobi files on your Kindle:

Read Protected MobiPocket Files on Your Kindle

You should check to see whether or not your eBook Reader supports DRMed Mobi and PDF files. The Irex Iliad and the Bookeen Cybook should play DRMed files without any fixes or hacks. Also if you have a PDA, iPhone, or other smart phone, chances are there is some software out there to play these files without any problems. Update: The new firmware update for the Sony PRS-505 means it too is able to read DRMed PDF files.