6 Tips for Making E-books Not-so-Horrible
E-books are either the bee’s knees or horrifically annoying, it depends on who you ask. If you happen to be one of those that lean toward the ‘annoying’ team, maybe you just haven’t picked up the right tricks. Here are 6 useful tips that make reading e-books and using e-readers not so awful.
1. Download Calibre.
Calibre is an e-book management app that makes everything about using e-readers much nicer. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (and maybe even BSD Unix) and can:
1. Streamline, sort and organize your book collection.
2. Be used to view books on the desktop.
3. Add, remove and sync books to and from your devices.
4. Convert e-books into multiple formats.
5. And even edit e-books, if you’re creating a book yourself.
It’s free and open-source and it’ll make your whole journey into becoming a digital bookworm much more palatable. If you want to learn more about this powerful program, here’s a really in-depth post from DearAuthor.com
2. Get a case.
One of the great things about e-readers is that you can carry them everywhere, bringing them places where carrying a hundred books just wouldn’t be practical (even though you may feel that you certainly need that many books with you). The problem is, you can usually drop a book (or bag of books) down a few stairs or off of a table and they’ll be just fine. Not gonna happen with your e-reader.
So definitely get a case or screen protector, and you’ll be much happier when the inevitable impact happens. There are both inexpensive and premium cases available for every reader and you should grab one as soon as you get your device. You can thank me later, after you drop it.
3. Learn about formats.
It’s a good idea to at least have an inkling about the different formats that are available for e-books. Although you may only have one e-reader and it may only use one format, you might buy another device in the future and you don’t want to render your book collection obsolete. Almost every e-book format is able to be converted to another with varying levels of success. All of them will generally end up readable, but you may lose some features (like bookmarks or some text formatting).
Here’s a pretty comprehensive comparison of the different formats. You don’t need to memorize all these formats or have a technical understanding about them at all. It’s just good to know that they’re out there and that your books aren’t useless if you change devices. They can ALL be converted!
4. Understand DRM.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is how publishers stop you from making unlimited copies of digital files. It’s been used on music files, video games and, you guessed it, e-books. Before you start investing boo koo bucks into your e-book collection, you should read up a bit on how publishers attempt to lock the books up. (MediaCrash doesn’t apply DRM to our e-books, by the way).
The reasons we don’t are somewhat complicated and have to do with media ownership, the history of online piracy, the punk rock ethos, anarchism, copyleft and all sorts of gnarly tech legalese that I won’t get into in this article. All you need to know is vaguely what it is, and that it can be removed, lol.
Once again, to help you out, I’ve found a good explanation of both points here. If you have any really technical questions about this stuff, leave a comment and I’ll explain as best I can.
Backup your books!
Amazon makes it pretty easy to have an online backup of all your Kindle books, but not every reader does the same. Also, the way that Amazon does syncing has some risks, and won’t help you if some of your books aren’t in the Kindle format (I think they might sync PDF, but they won’t do many of the other formats).
Your best bet is to take care of backing up your book collection yourself. You can do this on your own computer, but you can also do it online with a cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive, Sugarsync, etc. I use this really old school shell provider called SDF but it’s not all that user friendly (don’t attempt to use this unless you’re really into UNIX).
Here are a couple of ways that you can backup your books and sync them with your devices:
1. Using Dropbox with your Kindle device.
2. Creating a cloud of e-books.
Although the aforementioned links are somewhat dated, I searched around and couldn’t find better explanations from even more recent articles. They should be enough to point you in the right direction at least.
6. Use your library.
My last post was a run down of all the not-so-obvious ways you can use your public library, and one of those ways was borrowing e-books. Setting up your e-reader so that you can access titles from your library truly ups the value of your device. Not only do you get access to free novels, but you can load magazines, textbooks (sometimes), newspapers and scientific journals (if that’s your cup of tea) on there too.
Now, you may wonder how you can use these library services if you use a Kindle, because Overdrive might not support the Kindle format. But remember Calibre, and how I mentioned it can convert e-books into different formats? That’s a hint…
Hopefully these tips will make your e-reader more useful and fun, and they’ll tip the non-believers toward reassessing those e-readers that they bought but never use. Don’t get me wrong, I love the printed page! But sometimes an e-book is the right tool for the job and it shouldn’t be like pulling teeth when you want to read.
And if you’re looking for cool e-books to test out your new, amped up, e-reader setup, don’t forget that we have Tales of the Fall – Book 1 and Book 2 available in our shop!
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