If you’re looking for a way to enjoy the convenience of ebooks without buying a separate, expensive ebook reader, then one website has "novel" (no pun intended) solution for you!

DailyLit (launched back in May 2007) allows you to read ebooks that are sent to your email via easy-to-read installments. You can chose from classics (which are free), or opt for a more contemporary book for a low price. I have yet to try this service, but it looks promising. People spend so much time reading email anyway, why not throw a book into the mix? Best of all, these books can be read on your cell phone (smartphones will work the best). You also have the option to read the ebooks through an RSS feed, which I find better than email for a lot of text.

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Sometimes we Americans like to think we’re so innovative, especially with the much-anticipated (and criticized) release of the Amazon Kindle. Sure, it can hold a few hundred books and download them directly from Amazon’s website. That’s soooo yesterday!

Japan, once again, has figured it out. They asked: Why carry around a cell phone AND a bulky reading device when cell phones are perfectly capable of handling the job of both?

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The release of Amazon’s ebook reading device has been out for a few days now, and many blogs I’ve read already gave their two cents. I have been hesitant to throw in my own opinion because I haven’t actually held the Kindle and took it for a test drive myself.

But for what its worth, the release of the Amazon Kindle is a good sign. It means that reading digital material is catching on, especially as more and more people realize that they’re already reading gobs of digital material already (ie. email, blogs, online articles, etc), so reading novels in digital format isn’t really a large leap.

However, not all is good and dandy in the world of ebooks. There are problems, very obvious problems, that keep ebooks and the devices these large corporations peddle to the us as readers that continue to plague the market. Here’s a rundown of those problems as I see them:

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If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve probably figured out that one of my small obsessions is talking about new ways to consume literature. As technology has progressed over the last few years, more and more options are coming onto the market that give the reading public easier ways to read their favorite novels (and basically everything else from poetry to internet content).

I recently came across an interesting post on the Print is Dead blog (one of my favorite reads), that took me to another blog that I didn’t even know existed that is simply called The Reader. Much of this blog appears to focus on consuming literature through the infamous iPhone. While the iPhone itself is fairly old news since its release in late June, its ability to be used as an electronic reading device is now being discussed.

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I talked a little about this subject in a previous post (Literary criticism shaped by Google), but I saw another blogger talking about this and thought it was worth exploring some more. When most people read a book, they probably don’t go very far outside the text. For example, many people probably just skip over words they don’t know the meaning of (I’m guilty of this), rather than picking up a dictionary to see what it means.

Ebooks are changing all that. Because an ebook is digital it allows the author and/or publisher to enhance the content of the book by inserting links and additional information. So, if there’s a word you don’t understand, you might just have to click on it and the definition appears in a small bubble.

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The other day I came across an interesting post on the Print is Dead blog, and the author made a very good point about ebooks and our willingness to read digital content:

…while eBook sales are still relatively small, people are indeed spending huge amounts of time online, consuming text in the form of websites and blogs (not to mention e-mail). So to say that eBooks are a failure in the face of this changing behavior is like lampooning the idea of air travel because flying cars haven’t caught on (meanwhile, millions of people are flying around in planes).

I really never thought about ebooks this way before, at least not until reading this blog. One of the biggest reasons I hear that ebooks will never (at least not anytime soon) catch on is because people don’t want to read large quantities of texts on their computer. But they already are!

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If you read the "old version" of Brad’s Reader (the one hosted by Blogger) you might recall that I bought the semi-new Sony Ebook Reader and gave it a quick review with my first impressions and other thoughts. Well, this is the update to that post.

I’ve had the Sony Reader for several weeks now and I have had a chance to put it through its paces. My verdict: satisfied! The device is portable, lightweight and very user-friendly. I carry it with me to school on a daily basis and find it easy to pull out, power up and get some reading done between classes. Even on the train, which I commute on daily, it’s easy to use.

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