I hopped on board Microsoft’s Reader in early 2001. The desire to continue using this product has influenced my choice of PDA, of phone now that PDAs are passé, and I have collected a couple hundred MS Reader titles, many protected.
I haven’t been too pleased with the trend, though, as far as publisher support. Many titles simply go lacking. At one time, I could buy MS Reader titles on Amazon; now that they’re foursquare behind Kindle, I cannot.
So – what do I do? Jump ship, converting my existing titles to some new format (where possible)? Hold out for the hope that Microsoft will relentlessly crush its opposition as it has in the past? Go back to killing trees to read? What?
Bite the bullet and get a Kindle! Fantastic device, easy to read, more than 200,000 books on Amazon. Almost all their best sellers are only $9.99, many less expensive. Order a book from Amazon and it will be sent via their Whispernet directly to the Kindle in about one minute. It is not WiFi, but uses the Sprint network (at no extra charge to the owner), so anywhere you get Sprint reception, you can use this. You can also download to your computer and with USB drag it over.
You can send any of your own .doc or .txt documents to it also. At Gutenberg, there are thousands of free classics out of copyright that you can also send to the device.
No legal way to convert your MS Reader books to Kindle, Sony Reader or any of the other good eBooks now using eInk screens.
Until they offer a backlit Kindle, I refuse to cave in. I read in bed and my Nokia 770 is fantastic as an ebook reader, even though Amazon refuses to offer any other digital format except Kindle.
Not for nothing, but if you have purchased the digital version of the book, it isn’t that hard to get it decrypted so you may use it on the reader of your choice. Except maybe Kindle.
I know I pimp out the Nokia 770 on all these threads, but I’ve read over 100 books on it even after my daughter dropped it in a 5 gallon bucket of water. As soon as I’m solvent, I’m buying several more because I figure at the rate they are going, it will be decades before someone that reads is allowed to give design input.
While the kindle will read other formats, unfortunately, it only does so if the format is plain txt, meaning almost no formatting, which may be an issue for some people.
As for biting the bullet… If you’re willing, it is certainly possible to decrypt protected .LIT files so you can use them on other devices. I doubt MS reader will last much longer, as Kindle has gained an impressive popularity and seems to have the most titles by a fair amount.
The date on that article looks like Oct. 2008 and they were predicting that version 2 would be out by the end of the year. Since they didn’t do that, why do you feel that it will just be another couple months?
I just work harder to find .lit
Amazon annoyed me with their Kindle-only support and their wireless-only delivery (so I can’t even convert them), so I shun Kindle!
Newsgroups sometimes have … um, let’s just say they have the ability to find hard-to-find books, and leave it at that.
You don’t have to abandon one ebook reader to use another - you can have several different readers installed on your cellphone, and just use whichever one happens to support the format that the book you want to read that day uses. How’s that for a sentence?
My husband and I both have kindles. There is a clip-on light you can use to read in the dark. Since we have two kindles on one account, we can share books and magazines.