I’m out of control.
I may open the first chapter of downloaders anonymous or something
Every day, I find myself dropping money in the Playstation Network, WiiWare, DSiWare, iTunes, Amazon (MP3, Video on Demand, Kindle), and of course, our beloved Android Market. So a time comes at the end of every month when I start pondering my downloads much more seriously and consider cutting back my spending.
I also start appreciating free services much more.
So since it’s the end of the month, and there’s been a ton of press about Google Books, and since I’m a Kindle user, all the forces have been pushing me to play with it.
Google Books has over a million free public domain books in PDF and ePUB formats, which is absolutely fantastic if you use any of the non-Kindle e-readers. If you use the Kindle, though, you’re pretty much screwed. You have to pay $1.09 for Amazon to convert each free .PDF file to an .AZW file. The recent addition of ePub just means there’s another format unsupported on the Kindle. I tried out the conversion to see what happens, and Amazon’s conversion rendered my “free” Google Books sideways. What a complete shamfuck!
Nope, Amazon does not render Google Books right!
Luckily, Google Books has been formatted as a mobile Web page for Android and iPhone, so I can still access the stuff for free if I’m really in need of a fix for classic literature. Though it’s not a dedicated app or anything, it’s still cool that it’s a fallback for Kindle users who are fortunate enough to have a high-quality mobile Webkit browser.
Google renders each book into chunks. The ones I checked out put nine book pages on a single mobile web site, and the text was formatted to an agreeable size. Instead of turning pages like you would on an e-reader, you just drag your finger up the page until you hit the bottom. Then you hit “next page,” and there you have it. I haven’t been able to get it to work without a Wi-Fi connection, though, so that is kind of a bitch.
However, you can get a free reader app like FBReader which lets you read ePub, download the books off of the Google page, and you’re pretty much set for reading even without a connection. I do wish there was a Kindle app for Android like there is for the iPhone, because I have zero intentions of reading a full book on my phone…the Kindle sync feature is really crucial. I’ve been trying to read Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy for like a month and it keeps giving me trouble. If you’ve read it, you know why. If not, I suggest you do. It’s real linguistic fun. If I had the ability to drag it over to my phone for some opportunistic reading, I would have been done by now.
Of course, if I finished that book sooner, I’d have bought more books and be that much poorer.
