ebook hunting

[mithriltabby]

The biggest retailers of ebooks are Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, both of which are in the habit of locking their books with DRM that prevents the books from being read by anything other than an approved device. (Barnes and Noble, to their credit, will allow an author to turn off DRM on their books, but they don’t give you a way to search for this, so you have to ask the author directly; Tim Pratt, Linda Nagata, and Walter Jon Williams are good sports.) These sorts of ebooks aren’t really being sold to you; they’re just rentals, only good as long as the store is open. We’ve seen music providers go under and take online music collections with them.

So where does one go for unlocked books, if you want to reward the good sports who are willing to trust their customers and sell them ebooks that will still be readable even if the store goes away? There are a number of formats, though it looks like EPUB (essentially a bunch of XHTML/CSS files in a ZIP container) is winning out. You can crack open an EPUB and edit it with open source tools like Sigil, making your own tweaks if you want to fix something. On Android, Aldiko is a good reader.

MOBI files are less popular, and I haven’t been paying as much attention to them; many electronic bookstores offer EPUB, MOBI, and PDF options.

• Webscription is the first place to check for science fiction and fantasy. They have pretty much everything that Baen publishes, as well as a smattering of titles from other publishers.
• Smashwords also has a good variety, including the Liaden chapbooks by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller; Walter Jon Williams is releasing his backlist there as well.
• Book View Café is publishing the out-of-print backlist for a number of science fiction authors.
• Weightless Books has a sparse selection, but is worth checking— they have some of Elizabeth Bear’s work from Subterranean Press.
• FS& have a very small selection thus far, but they have Daniel Keys Moran’s tales of the Continuing Time and Steve Perry’s Matador books.
• DriveThruFiction very rarely have work from known science fiction authors; I usually visit their sister site, DriveThruRPG, for PDFs of gaming books, and just turned up some of Alan Moore’s 2000AD work (in PDF form) on DriveThruComics.
• Fictionwise
• Wildside Press
• ereads

The different stores have their various foibles. Some allow keeping a wish list (useful if you want to keep track of books to purchase over time, in moderation, when freeing up physical shelf space), some don’t; some allow purchasing in bulk, while others make each book a separate transaction.