Free eBooks -- Manybooks and Feedbooks

For several years now, I have been going to ManyBooks.net for free ebooks. They were one of a very short list of sites that provide free ebooks compatible with .pdb (eReader) which was the compatible format for Palm OS app I used. I've found it convenient to go to them because of that. Add to that the fact that they have a very wide selection of stuff. They have around 28,000 books available in 23 different ebook formats. This was where I discovered some interesting titles like Blind Shrike, Halo and Graveyard of Dreams. I also found classics like The Art of War, The Cathedral and The Bazaar, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Jude the Obscure and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet.

I recently got an Android device though, and that has had me working with .epub more. I'm certainly glad that new devices coming to market have been gravitating to .epub in that the trend will make it possible to cut down the competing formats into 2-3. I mean I had to live with ebook format hell, just like I had to endure codec hell with media players.The books that I wanted were sometimes not available in the format I needed. Conversion was usually a complicated affair, converting to one format before converting to the final format you'll be using. And even then conversions usually messed up the way text was displayed and didn't preserve chapter info. Having a limited list of popular formats makes publishers concentrate on those and that makes the need for conversions obsolete.

Moving on from that rant, .epub is quite popular these days. I've found it easy to convert old PDF and PDB format ebooks into EPUB using Calibre (more on that in another post). For new stuff, I also discovered a new site when I started using the Aldiko ebook reader on my HTC Tattoo. My new favorite goto site for free ebooks is Feedbooks. Feedbooks lists a wide variety of ebooks from public domain books. They also have a growing list of original books, creative works whose authors have chosen to release free of cost to readers as a form of promoting their lit. Different from ManyBooks.net that hosts every possible format you may ever want, Feedbooks concentrates on today's popular formats. You can download in only three formats -- .epub, .azw (Kindle) and .pdf. There's a fourth option for Custom PDF that's only available to registered users. Custom allows you to configure the size of each page (in mm) and the font (type and size) to use according to what will fit your device's screen. You wouldn't have to convert it any further after that. Feedbooks also has a mobile site to make it easier to scroll and pan while looking for books to download. I've tested downloading to my phone. It's really convenient when you see something interesting and want to download it immediately lest you forget when you get to your PC.

While both have their own pros and cons, I go to both sites primarily to discover something new. Oddly enough, you don't have to buy anything to discover works that interest you. I first discovered authors like Rick Dakan (Geek Mafia) and Benjamin Rosenbaum (True Names) browsing through both sites. I've also stumbled upon old titles that I've wanted to read in the past, but didn't have the inclination to buy.

Makers - You and Me

I've started reading Cory Doctorow's Makers. It all started when listening to This Week in Tech (TWIT) I heard Doctorow speak about a subject he's very passionate about. I had read a few of his books before, all free downloads from Craphound.com. Hearing him again made me look at books he recently posted. He makes ebook versions of his books available for free and makes money off the book sales. It may seem counterintuitive to do that, but he has a following and he was able to make it work.

Anyway, reading the first 60 or so pages has already made an impression on me. So much so that my head's has been buzzing with ideas, half-baked all of them, of how to create value out of ideas. I studied entrepreneurship in college and I know the value of a good idea. But tradition has it that creating means making a tangible product you could sell. Reading Makers has made me realize that it doesn't have to be a product per se. An idea has an intrinsic value in itself and to monetize that is where you get a profit from. Whether or not its commercially viable is up to the public but an idea you have is bound to be useful to someone somewhere. Sounds familiar to me. It's actually one of the reason why I blog. My thoughts may not hold much value for you but they may be to someone else.

Moving along those thoughts, I find my self wanting to move my blog out of Blogger. I haven't really been taking it seriously, posting snippets of my life and my opinion from time to time. I had an incident a few weeks back where my personal blog was tagged as spam by a bot. The appeals process took at least 2 weeks, but that made me realize that I valued the content of my personal blog so much. I want to protect it. Moving to hosted space, I could secure that data as long as I was willing to pay for it. The crux is that it has to be self-sustaining. So why not get serious with monetizing one of them to subsidize the personal blogs, right?

I've been talking to an old friend who offered to host my blog for a very friendly price. I just need to iron out a few things to make it work, mostly the logistics of moving my data over and sourcing the money I need to pay for the service.

I created something when I started blogging. It is valuable to me, and if my belief holds true, it is of value to someone else. I will make the move and in doing so I want to create more to continue doing what I love to do - write. Makers. We are all creators in our own small way. We should realize that is valuable, more than we ever seem to truly think.

Dive Into Cryptonomicon

I've been looking at local bookstores for a copy of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Last Saturday, I went to Marquee Mall with the wife and kids to meet up with old friends. We were there for a few hours and my baby girl was getting restless, enough so that I had to take outside to calm her down a bit. I wasn't aware that Fully Booked was 2 storefronts away from the coffee shop that we went to. I decided to take the little one with me and go look at what they had on their shelves.

The Fully Booked store at Marquee was definitely bigger than the one in SM Clark. And you know what that means. More shelves mean better variety. I asked one of the staff in passing if they had any Neal Stephenson books in stock. He excused himself, saying he would check their inventory. I walked around, baby in tow, around the shelves. My baby girl was touching the spines of books, face me and say "book" with a smile. That made my day. My baby girl, she liked being around books. And I, like a boy excited, browsed the shelves breathing in the atmosphere, wanting to grab and take home every little (and big) book that caught my eye.

It's been a ritual of sorts for me since high school, when I first discovered books weren't just for reading, as in as a skill, like in school. I discovered books were also for enjoyment. That opened the floodgates. Back then, the only large bookstore that carried novels was National Bookstore. Most of them were in Manila, very few were in the provinces. So it was during my freshman year that I got the chance to go to different National Bookstore branches. Buying textbooks was my flimsy excuse. But behind that was a motive. I had always loved browsing through the shelves. The school libraries I had gone to had always had textbooks and naught more. National Bookstore was way better stocked. And in those days, nobody bothered you if say you picked up a book and leafed through it some. Sampling a chapter or two was okay with the clerks. No one stared at you for guerilla reading back then. So each time I had a chance to get to a National Bookstore, I would wander wide-eyed amongst the shelves and not mind time. I still do that, actually. Every so often, I'd go into a bookstore and be lost in the shelves.

These days, I have money to spend, though most of the time I have to spend it on something more important. Once in a while I would indulge in a book or two. The clerk at Fully Booked returned with a paperback copy of Cryptonomicon. I was so glad that I unwittingly smiled and told him that I've been looking for a copy for a long time and all the bookstores I've been to didn't have it. He guided me to the section where he got it from and I found there was second much smaller copy. It had a font size that I preferred and it cost about half as much. I choose the 2nd copy of Cryptonomicon and took it home.

I haven't really had time to read it yet. I've gone through the 1st chapter and some of the 2nd. Hopefully by this weekend I can free up some time to do so. Wish me luck.

Derailed

So I started reading The Alchemist before last week ended. I was half-way through it in a matter of hours. However the convenience of the ebooks lined up and saved on my phone was just too hard to resist. I ended up reading a couple of pages on each of my breaks, then my pace gradually sped up again. I'm at least 80 pages into The Bourne Legacy. I've put The Alchemist on indefinite hold. Worst still is the fact that I've yet to start Cryptonomicon, just the kind of story a geek would naturally be drawn to.

Cryptonomicon had been on my line up of To Read's for a few weeks now along with Daemon. I just can't seem to pull away from the Bourne series. I'm just so into it right now that I've forgotten I was supposed to read the first three so I could compare notes when I watched the Bourne movies. But I'm stuck. I haven't read the other books I had lined up. I haven't watched the Bourne movies. I'm more or less increasing my pace into The Bourne Legacy and I'm blogging less (yes, I had posts I was planning to write up). Oh, well. It's best to go with the flow for a while. I'm still more or less a happy camper.

Books, Books, Books

Lately, I've been doing all of my reading on ebooks. In the last three months or so I've been able to finish some seven or eight books. Most of my reading I did on coffee breaks or at night before going to sleep. Breaks are convenient for guerilla reading - LOL. And since I have the eBooks on my phone, I need not keep the lights on at night and it doesn't bother my sleeping wife.

So far, I've read mostly spy novels. Actually it's more of a nostalgia trip rather than straightforward interest. See when I was in high-school, I started reading novels. Mostly it was old books from my sister's Hardy Boys collection and Stephen King Novels borrowed from a dear old friend. For a time, I was even fixated on George Stark, a character in The Dark Half. But then as I read on, my imagination got the better of me. I had to get away from the scary stuff so I had to stop reading them. Pet Sematary actually gave me a couple of weeks worth of nightmares.

During my college years, things took on complications. I had 2 sets of friends, one group around my age and another 10-15 years older than I was. It was from the younger set that I got the cutting edge and 'literary' stuff. I was not uncommon to have copies of Tolkien, the Philippine Collegian, Rolling Stone Magazine, literary reviews and post-grad journals strewn about in the desks of our office. I kept a desk at the school paper, a convenient tambayan. That office really was more of a collective fast-moving informal library than anything else.

From the older guys I got influenced into trying spy and suspense novels. The same kind of books my father read. Me and my father were going through a difficult time back then and having a neutral common interest helped my bridge differences. He favored Robert Ludlum most of all. My older friends on the other hand exposed me to other writers like John Le Carre, Sidney Sheldon, Mario Puzo, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy and James Clavell.

Fast-forward to the future some ten odd years after I left college and here I am pre-occupied mostly with work, the kids and chores. I barely find time to blog any more and it makes me feel like I'm loosing something. My mind needs to churn, not with random worries, but with good reads to stir the imagination. So it's either I create content or consume it. With the limitations I have on time, I chose to read instead of write. eBooks were perfect because I could load them into my phone and read anywhere. So for the last few months I've managed to read the The Bourne Trilogy (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum). I've also managed to read the first three books of the Covert One Series: The Hades Factor, The Cassandra Compact and The Paris Option. I'm all set to read the last three books of both series but I think I need a break from the spy stuff, as I tweeted yesterday. So I picked up a book I bought a couple of weeks ago. I completely forgot about it, but found it on our bookshelf this morning. I'm going to start reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho today. This is going to be one sweet read :-)