E BOOK SPECIAL...... HAVE YOU TRIED E-BOOKS YET?

HAVE YOU TRIED E-BOOKS YET?

Many booklovers swear by the romantic notion of holding and reading a hardcover or paperback, with arguments that they enjoy the feel of well-worn pages, and the smell of books. Still, digital books – or e-books – have their own advantages: you can carry hundreds of such titles on a single device; these are easily available and more economically priced in most cases; you save on physical storage space; plus you get access to hundreds of titles for free. So if you love reading, you might want to give e-books a shot…

WHERE TO GET THEM…

Search for “e-books” on the internet, and you will be provided with myriad sources that offer both paid and free downloads. But just to make things easier, you might want to start with the websites listed below… Amazon.com: Download the free Amazon Kindle app for your smartphone and tablet; create a free account on this service – if you haven’t already – and you can browse over 30 lakh titles across genres such as fiction, crime, children and young adult, sci-fi, fantasy, biographies, academic books, and more. Of these, there are over 40,000 free titles that you can add to your personal library. Digital books are also available in regional languages like Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam and Gujarati.

The titles you download are displayed on the app’s main page, and you can read them there itself. You get built-in tools like a dictionary, a highlighter, and one to add annotations.

Amazon also offers comic books and graphic novels, so you can even enjoy these in full colour on your device.You don’t even need to worry about storage as you get unlimited cloud space for your books.

And if you are using your PC or Mac, you can visit read.amazon.in to read the digital books in your web browser. You get the same user interface, controls and experience as you would get with the mobile app.

For new readers, this e-book store has an “unlimited reading plan” which starts at ₹150 per month. You can even try the 30-day trial plan without spending a rupee. This gives you access to over 10 lakh e-books at zero cost. You don’t own the e-books; once you are done reading a title, you need to “return” it in order to download another.

Kobo.com : This website is similar to Amazon, and you will find a wide selection or free and paid e-books, including a few in Indian languages. Create a free account, download its Kobo Books app for your device, and that’s all it takes to get you started with this online store.

Loyalbooks.com : Amazon and Kobo are great stores from where you can buy popular titles written by best-selling and established authors. Loyal Books, on the other hand, is a resource that is home to free e-books. Here, you will find a vast collection of “public domain” audio books and e-books in over 20 genres including adventure, children, fantasy, sci-fi, humour, literature, nonfiction, poetry and romance.

You can browse for authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, P G Wodehouse, Emily Bronte, Mark Twain, Ayn Rand, Aesop, Hans Christian Anderson, and more. Search for any title or author, and you are provided with a synopsis of the book along with reviews by other readers and listeners. You can download the e-book, stream its audio narration or download the file for offline listening.

Free-e-books.net : Like Loyal Books, this website houses thousands of free e-books, in over 100 categories, by new and independent authors. Sign up for a free account, and you can download up to five titles in the PDF format every month.

Paid plans include monthly, yearly and lifetime memberships where you are promised additional features such as downloads in multiple formats (ePub, Kindle, txt and audio books) and priority customer service.

You can, of course, also find classics from authors such as Mark Twain, Mary Shelly, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Arthur Conan Doyle and William Shakespeare.

NEED BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS?

Goodreads.com : This resource is home to a fantastic community of booklovers that will help you discover new authors and book titles.

After you create a free account with the service —or sign in with a Facebook orAmazon accountyou are prompted to select the genres of books you like to read; rate the books you’ve already read, and mark those you’d like to read.

Goodreads then uses this data—of at least 20 book ratings—to suggest new titles you might find interesting. Every book listed carries a rating out of five, which is based on reader feedback and reviews.

You also can join specific groups – Indian readers, espionage fiction, thrillers, etc – to find like-minded book fans. Goodreads is also available as a free app for Android, iOS, and Kindle Fire devices.  

MANAGE YOUR BOOK COLLECTION…

Calibre-ebook.com : If you use the Amazon Kindleor the Kobo Book app, the services maintain a library for all your titles. But if you download e-books from other websites onto your computer, you will need to catalogue your collection to help you readily find whatever you want to read or share.

Calibre is a free software—available for Mac, Windows and Linux—that does this job for you. Import all your e-books into the software and it organises your entire digital library. You can choose between a list view for all your books or a graphical grid view.

To create a better digital library, Calibre allows you to edit and/or download metadata for each book: You can add a cover image, enter keywords for better search, and even rate each title out of five stars. You can use one-touch controls to browse books by genre, rating, keywords, author and even in alphabetical order.

The tool comes with a built-in e-reader that is equipped with features for bookmarking, text annotation, font customisation, and more.

Calibre even has a feature that lets you search any e-book from multiple sources on the internet. The listings are provided with links from where the title can be bought and downloaded. Click on your choice, and you are taken to the third-party website to complete the transaction. In the case of free e-books: they are downloaded and stored in your Calibre library.

With this software, you can convert e-books from one format to the other, and even send a title from your PC to your e-book reader, or to your friends and family via email. To send books to your Kindle e-reader, for instance, you will need to configure Calibre with an email address. Here, the software only accepts Outlook.com and GMX.com emails. You will also need to add this email address as a trusted source on your Amazon Kindle account.

Calibre even has a ‘Fetch News’ feature that downloads daily digests from hundreds of sources on the internet, including 23 sources from India.

Ashutosh Desai & Savio D’Souza

TOI16DEC17