I'm going to Canada for four weeks. I thought about getting an ebook reader as an easy way of carrying a lot of books, but the Iliad reader is ridiculously expensive. Allan Cochrane
You can use almost any handheld computer, PDA or smart phone as an ebook reader, so you may already have something suitable. If not, the PDA section on eBay has hundreds of old Pocket PCs, Palms, Psions and similar machines, many of them going very cheaply. I've used an HP Jornada CE machine (one with a decent keyboard) and a Dell Axim mainly for Pocket PC street maps, word processing and email, but the ebook Reader software works reasonably well on a small screen, using Microsoft's ClearType. Also, eReader works well on Palm OS, while there's TomeRaider for Psions and other devices.
But first, see what kind of books you might want, as not every ebook is available in every format. Lots of books are available in plain text and other common formats from sites such as Project Gutenberg and the University of Virginia. Fictionwise supports 12 formats including Microsoft Reader (LIT) for PCs and Pocket PC devices, and Mobipocket (PRC) for Palm, Pocket PC, BlackBerry and Symbian. The main copy-protected formats are Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader and Palm eReader. Text Library (www.textlibrary.com) has lots of useful links.
Note: Amazon's Kindle is not available in the UK.
