Snagging Free (and Legal) Ebooks

As I may have mentioned on previous posts, one of my "productive" pastimes (aside from blogging) is reading. I have a small collection of trade paperbacks, comics and pocketbooks at home and I do not hesitate to re-read them once the urge hits me. The past couple of years, that small collection of books had been largely undisturbed because I have been reading exclusively from my PDA. There is a virtual library of Ebooks out there and I've been an avid collector of Ebooks since I discovered its joys through my trusty Palm IIIxe.

I used to get my ebooks from Memoware but despite the size of its collection of *free* Ebooks, I found myself going to the Project Gutenberg website and get other freely downloadable Ebooks for my reading. The difference between these two sites is file format. Most of the downloadable ebooks at Memoware are already formatted for the popular Ebook readers. Those found at the Project Gutenberg site are mostly in "raw" TXT format and this gives users the choice to convert it to the format of their preferred Ebook reader.

Another source of free and legally downloadable Ebooks are manuals of Open Source applications. I am in the middle of reading "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" by Allen B. Downey, Jeffrey Elkner and Chris Meyers. Using iSiloX, I was able to convert the online version of the book into a format readable by my Treo650 (of course using iSilo).

technorati tags: free ebooks, isilo