Inspirational Technology

Free eBooks from Microsoft

To spur the interest in eBooks, Microsoft is running a promotion giving away three eBooks each week. They're in encrypted/encumbered Microsoft Reader format of course, but you can't complain too much for free. The first three books are online now.

One of them is A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is a title I was pretty interested in reading so I was happy to see this.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of reading on my Pocket PC and I'm really starting to like eBooks. Well at least the ones that have reasonable or no DRM like those for the Palm Reader. Palm Reader books aren't tied to the continued existence of any particular service. They're encrypted with the credit card number that you used to purchase them. That makes for a pretty effective deterrent to sharing them and it still gives you control over them. The only problem is that over time tracking the keys will be a problem as CC numbers change and they are of course dependent on the continued existence of the Palm Reader software.

Unfortunately, future proof is something that just doesn't exist when formats are proprietary and that makes me very hesitant to spend any real money on digital formats. I'm trying to keep an open mind and explore all the angles, but it's tough when the formats are not designed with the concerns of the consumer in mind.