Community Matters

I know that most people will shake their heads and call me crazy. I mean, seriously – even the Nexus One (which has one of the bigger screens among phones) has only a 3.7″ display. Tiny.

But stay with me for a moment. The reason I never bought an ebook reader is that I don’t want to carry yet another device with me. I have way too many already. So I instead carried paperbacks. Silly, I know. A kindle would have been smaller. But another several hundred dollars? Plus content from only one monopolist (and we know what that does to prices).

A few weeks ago I tried reading a book on my Nexus One and was positively surprised. The AMOLED screen is great for reading – no backlight! And the best thing about reading books on your phone? If you are anything like me, your phone is always with you. So you can read your book wherever you are, wherever a sudden break comes up.

Yes, the screen is tiny and you flip pages a lot. But it’s not as painful as it sounds – give it a try. I’ve now completed three books on my phone and I think I’m hooked – which makes me feel very sorry for our neighborhood bookstore…

The thing that finally won me over is that there’s a surprising amount of choice when it comes to reading books on an Android phone. You can read Mobipocket books (via FBreader – and Calibre if they are DRM infected). You can read books from Diesel ebooks, ereader.com and of course Barnes and Nobles. The latter is somewhat surprising at first since they explicitly don’t support Android – but it turns out that the free ereader Android app reads Barnes and Nobles ebooks as well. The download from your library somehow fails with the Android browser (still need to figure out why). But download to your computer and manually transfer to the eReader directory on your sdcard and the eReader app will find them and display them just fine. Turns out eReader is a subsidiary of Barnes and Noble and they use the same DRM technology and keys.

With all these choices, most books are available. And you often find wildly differing prices. The book I’m currently reading (Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly) I found in every single one of the stores mentioned with prices from USD 9.99 (Barnes and Nobles) to USD 27.99 (Barnes and Nobles subsidiary eReader.com). Go figure.