How to find e-books

Everything seems to point towards the second decade of the twenty-first century seeing the definitive expansion of e-books and their popularisation. The arrival of electronic ink e-book readers, led by Amazon's Kindle, has been an extraordinary aid to their dissemination, and the growing demand for e-book readers and for digital versions of the books that can be found in bookshops, along with the changes occurring in the publishing world, lead to this prediction.

 

When acquiring an e-book, however, the first thing to remember is that there are different formats and, often, each version requires a different application for them to be displayed. Therefore, the first thing you need to know is what file format or formats can be displayed by the e-book reader that you have.

The most widely-used e-book formats include: .EPUB, .PRC (Mobipocket), .PDF, AZW (Kindle), .LIT (Microsoft), .HTML, .TXT and .DOC. Despite this, if you acquire a work published in a different standard from the one that a specific e-book reader can read, you can always use one of the format conversion programs that you'll find on the internet, such as Calibre (open-source software) or ABC Amber ePub converter.

In any event, e-books are increasingly entering the bibliographic collections of libraries, now making up a considerable part and growing constantly. As in the case of books on paper, e-books can also be loaned, an option that appears to be gaining more supporters every day as users acquire devices for reading e-books.

 

The UOC Library:, for example, offers a series of e-books from its catalogue, most with free download, and an e-book reader lending service to its users.

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Once you know the file formats that your device can read, you can access any of the many websites where you can find e-books to download, be it free or paying.

Some of the most popular free e-book download websites are Digital Book Index, Project Gutenberg, The Online Books Page and, in Spain, LIBROdot.com and Elaleph.

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