This week, I finally broke down and bought an ebook reader — B&N’s $150 WiFi Nook (ISBN 9781400532629). It’s a beautiful little device.
I got the Jonathan Adler Punctuation Cover (978161560062) since it’s both very sturdy and cheaper than most.
I’ve already side-loaded 90 free books onto the device. These books have come from several places. In no particular order:
• The Lee County Public Library lets you borrow ebooks via Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) software. You can use ADE to side-load ebooks onto a nook.
• Project Gutenberg — the first place to go for books from the public domain. All of their books are now availible in ePub versions.
• Google Books, Some of the scans availible are in the public domain, and are therefore downloadable. Generally, the Gutenberug editions are a higher quality than the Google versions, since The Gutenberg tries to be an ideal textual copy of the book while Google tries to be a good representation a particular physical book.
• Many of the works of Cory Doctorow are availible as ePubs on his website, Craphound. I especially recommend Makers and Little Brother.
• The Baen Free Library — All copyrighted works which you may read for free, and all are availible as ePubs.
• The Baen CD Mirror — These files are also copyrighted but free to redistribute. The newer CDs have ePub files on them. The older CDs do not, but you can use a program like Calibre to covert file formats.
Places to buy eBooks:
• http://bn.com/ebooks — of course. Also check the Unbound Blog every friday for the name of a free book that can be added to your B&N library that week. [Update. Here, too: http://bn.com/freelibrary]
• Webscription — A store that sells unencombered ebooks, all of which are availible in ePub format. The prices aren’t bad at all.