Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune brings an interesting point to light on his blog. Isn’t your BlackBerry the perfect medium for eBooks? Yes, we know that people decry the medium, saying they won’t want to read an entire book in electronic format. We empathize with that. We long ago tried to read eBooks in Adobe Reader, and quickly tired of the experience. Who wants to sit in front of their computer reading, anyway? However, devices like Sony’s PRS-505 are making eBooks far more practical. If you don’t want to drop $300 on a device like the PRS-505, you can just use your BlackBerry to read eBooks.
Following links to e-book stores from the Mobipocket site, I bought a complete works of Jane Austen for about $8 and downloaded it to my phone, all in less than five minutes. Not only was my book group reading “Pride and Prejudice” next, but it seemed a fair test of digital reading to use books I had loved the first time I read them. Later, I learned that if you go to the free online library Project Gutenburg (gutenberg.org), you can find thousands of free books, including “Pride and Prejudice,” in a variety of formats.
We’ve long been fans of Project Gutenberg, though we knew it would take a medium like an electronic reader to really get it off the ground. With current reader technology, you can change the background and font colors, as well as the font style and text. This way, you read things on your own terms. And it’s in a more book-like format.
New features also enable you to annotate books, as well as save your place. Basically, you’d have a small library at your arsenal, without even getting up to go to one. As big book nerds, we totally dig this technology.
You can get Mobipocket Reader over at http://www.mobipocket.com. Let us know if you read eBooks on your BlackBerry, or plan to. We think it’s one of the better uses for the device when you’re not using it for work. Ah ha, and it looks like you’re doing work while you’re reading. That’s a double-plus.
