You’ll also find a lot of support for PDF and plain text, too, but those are well-understood and handled formats within open source already. You’ll find quite a few eBook formats, but the ones that matter the most for the most popular devices (Kindle, Nook, and iBooks on iOS) are ePub and Mobipocket. But if you want to read classics or publish your own books, you have lots of great options with open source. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer to that if you want access to the latest books via electronic formats. If you want access to new books, you’re stuck choosing one of the major vendors (Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, etc.) and then as you acquire more material, you get locked into those vendors and their readers. I don’t find it upsetting that publishers are trying to find a way to limit sharing of eBooks, but the side effect is that users really lack options when it comes to acquiring books. If you have an ePub book without DRM, you can read it anywhere.īut ePub supports an optional DRM scheme, so publishers can add DRM to it and restrict it to one player or one type of DRM format. For example, ePub is a widely supported format that can be read by a number of eBook devices like Barnes and Noble’s Nook and iBooks on iOS. When you buy books from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, etc.the books are encrypted with DRM so that you can’t open them on multiple devices or competing devices - even if they support the same format. Yes, the industry likes to call it Digital Right’s Management, but that’s really not what’s going on. One of the problems with eBooks, or some eBooks, is Digital Restriction Management (DRM). Annoyingly, they not only offer many formats, but also several DRM schemes too. Just as video and digital audio have a lot of formats to choose from, so do eBooks. If you’re new to eBooks, you might be wondering what I’m babbling about with regards to format conversions. Oh, and it also lets you read your books too. Calibre handles library management, format conversion, syncing to your device, and more. I didn’t coin that term for Calibre - that’s their motto. The best of the lot? Calibre, a one stop solution for all your e-book needs. But if you don’t get the gadget of your choice, or if you want to create content to fill one, you’ll find plenty of eBook software for Linux as well as open source software to publish your own. A Kindle, a Nook, or perhaps just an Android device that runs eBook software. Many of us are hoping for an eBook reader under the tree.
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