ebooks?

Hi all..

There don't appear to have been any new ebooks for some time and I've not seen mention of any to come.

Does anyone know if there are any new ebooks planned?

 

There are a couple that I've heard about. There's supposed to be one with with Survivor's Quest and possibly with Cestus Deception.

 

Woot!

(New story eBooks are good, but eBooks of the actual novels are better.)

 

I do know that Barnes and Noble will no longer be selling any ebooks.

 

(New story eBooks are good, but eBooks of the actual novels are better.)

No, e-book versions of actual novels are inferior. There's an excellent chance that most folks will already have the book itself, their not going to want to buy the same book once again in e-book format just to say they have it as an e-book.

Plus regular books can be read anywhere, anytime as long as you have a light source. And a light source does not have to be electric. E-books can only be read if they have electricity to power them. If you loose power and you need to plug in your e-book reader, you're out of luck. If it runs off batteries and you're using recharable batteries, you're once again out of luck if they runout during a black out. And if you're using regular batteries of any kind to power your e-book reader, in the long run all your e-books will cost you more than it cost to buy them and the reader because you'll have to keep buying batteries to keep powering the reader to read the e-books.

Not to mention the fact that reading things that appear electronically on a screen does not have the same feeling as reading from a book. Or the fact that reading a screen for too long is not good for the eyes.

 

agreed - "real" books are superior to ebooks

however, I did like the additional stories that were released in ebook-only format (such as Ylesia, Recovery etc), and I was wondering if there were any more planned.

 

Posted by Knight1192:
No, e-book versions of actual novels are inferior. There's an excellent chance that most folks will already have the book itself, their not going to want to buy the same book once again in e-book format just to say they have it as an e-book.

On that, I agree. But he mentioned (and I was supporting) simultaneous eBook release along with the novel.

[reasons why regular books are better]

Well, I'll have to wait and see for sure how Del Rey handles the eBooks before I can say for certain that they're superior. But for the Star Trek novels, the electronic versions are less than half the price of the print versions. To me, that more than makes up for the potential inconvenience of there being a long-term power outage like earlier this summer.

Not to mention the fact that reading things that appear electronically on a screen does not have the same feeling as reading from a book. Or the fact that reading a screen for too long is not good for the eyes.

Well, in that case I'm frelled, 'cause the amount of time I spend reading books is insignificant compared to the other time I spend in front of a screen.

 

Posted by The_Phantom_Munkeh:
I did like the additional stories that were released in ebook-only format (such as Ylesia, Recovery etc), and I was wondering if there were any more planned.

Not that we've been told about. Neither Shatterpoint nor The Unifying Force had one (both were planned, but slipped through the cracks, timewise). I haven't heard anything about Survivor's Quest having one or not, though.

 

2ndQuest, most of the Hardcovers have had e-books along with them, so it stands to reason that they will have e-stories along with them.

 

Where is a good place to get ebooks from? I have been considering adding ebooks to my reading list. What do I need to read ebooks etc.

 

Posted by CrystalKenobi:
Where is a good place to get ebooks from?

Content Link, the bookstore run by Random House (owners of Del Rey). Their prices are the same or cheaper than Amazon.

I have been considering adding ebooks to my reading list. What do I need to read ebooks etc.

It depends on the format. I'll give a brief description of each:

Adobe: an encrypted PDF, thus limited support for changing font sizes and such; requires Adobe Acrobat Reader 6 (yes, the same reader is used for normal PDFs and their eBooks) for Windows or Mac

Microsoft: encrypted, compressed HTML, support for varying text sizes, no text-to-speech support with encrypted books (but tools are available to both decrypt the books so you can use TTS, and to extract it to HTML for use on unsupported devices--I used this to put it on my graphing calculator ); uses Microsoft Reader for Windows or Pocket PC

Palm: I don't know for sure how it works, but I believe similar to the Microsoft format. No TTS support that I'm aware of, but varying font sizes are supported. Requires Palm Reader (their website), and supports Windows, Mac, Pocket PC, and Palm OS (v4 and up, I think).