Ben Franklin in My Pocket PC

I like eBooks. I know they're not as easy to read as ink on paper, but they're nowhere near as bulky, either. With a 32Mb CompactFlash card I can carry a small library with me wherever I go. When I have a spare moment I open up Thoreau's Walden or Ben Franklin's autobiography and enjoy.

I'm not the only one who likes eBooks. Discussions on the Pocket PC newsgroups and online forums indicate that eBooks are popular. Commuters in particular like the convenience, and eBooks are also popular with non-native speakers of English, who like being able to look up the meaning of English words in the Pocket PC version of Encarta.

A vast library of eBooks on the Web

While "eBook" is a term for any electronic text, I use it in this article to refer to electronic texts formatted for Microsoft's MS Reader application. This column is devoted to some of the best places to download eBooks for your Pocket PC.

Elegant Solutions Software and Publishing (www.esspc-ebooks.com) is a popular site for downloading eBooks for the Pocket PC. Ken Mattern calls his site a labor of love and credits his fourth grade teacher for instilling in him a love of reading. Ken is devoted to turning the books he's read, or would like to read, into eBook format and making them available online for free. All of Ken's eBooks have attractive cover graphics and are guaranteed to work with the Pocket PC. His book categories include Modern Nonfiction, Modern Fiction, Classic Fiction, Classic Nonfiction, Science Fiction, Computer, History, and more. Each week Ken features and reviews one of his titles. When I visited most recently, Ken had reviewed Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle.

Dot Lit (www.dotlit.com) is another site you might want to check out. Like Ken's site, Dot Lit is striving for quality. They offer "signature editions" that pay special attention to subtleties of typography and include illustrations in some works. For example, their version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court includes a dozen illustrations from the original edition. The authors represented include Joseph Conrad, Tolstoy, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Zane Grey, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

MemoWare (www.memoware.com) has provided electronic content for PDAs since 1996, but has only recently offered material formatted for the Pocket PC. I checked the language category and found a variety of translation dictionaries, a Webster's Encyclopedia, anthologies of verse, writer's guides, and more. The MemoWare library has over 7,000 volumes in a wide range of categories, all well organized. Many but not all of these books are available in eBook format.

The University of Virginia's eBook site (http://etext.virginia.edu/ebooks) has over 1,600 titles in Reader format. Unlike most eBook sites, it lets you do a full-text search of the entire collection. The subject categories reflect a multicultural perspective and include African American, Native American, and women writers. Other categories include Civil War, Literature in Translation, Illustrated Classics, and Early American Fiction. The University of Virginia has a more comprehensive collection of Web (HTML) documents available at (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu).

Blackmask Online (www.blackmask.com/Books_for_MS_Reader) has over 2,000 titles in eBook format. Some of their categories are atypical and fascinating, such as Enlightenment Thinkers, Modern Thinkers, and Renaissance Thinkers. There is a delightful whimsy in this site. For example, here's the annotation for the fiction category: "The sort of books that aren't true, in the strictest sense, but can hit higher realities on occasion."

Chris De Herrera's eBook Directory (www.cewindows.net/scripts/linkman/linkmat.cgi) has a large selection of free eBooks and an excellent search function. You can find eBooks by category (fiction, non-fiction, classics, etc.), title, author, Dewey Decimal number and more.