In the four years since my master’s thesis was published by Western Oregon University on Digital Commons, it has been downloaded 2,036 times. Oddly, though, I have not heard from readers or seen it cited. What strange times we live in! If you read my thesis, please email me@danielgreene.com or leave a comment to let me know how you used it in your research and/or practice. Thanks!
I just found out that WordPress.com, the advertising-averse blogging platform that hosts this site, allows bloggers to earn revenue by posting affiliate links. What?!? I wish I’d known this years ago! I’m this nice guy who, for years, has had links on this blog to Amazon for books I contributed to — just to make it easier for people to find them — even though I wasn’t getting royalties for purchases or commissions for referrals. All this time, I could have been earning at least a few pennies from Amazon for the business I was sending their way. Who knew?
Well, since I’m this nice guy who spreads the word for the greater good, I’m telling the WordPress.com community about this opportunity in case I wasn’t the only one in the dark. Basically, WordPress.com says it’s okay to post affiliate links to goods you like and think your readers might like, as long as you’re a real blogger who writes original content and doesn’t just use your blog to sell stuff.[1] I’ve always been an honest blogger with loads of original content; now I know I can turn my “free advertising” into commissions each time a reader follows one of my product links and chooses to purchase the product. Yay!
There are several affiliate programs out there, but in case you’re interested here’s a link to Amazon.com’s Affiliate Program I just joined. They pay 4% on every purchase readers make from your affiliate links. Hey, even if it only gets a blogger a few dollars a year, it doesn’t hurt.
[1] WordPress.com Support > Policies & Safety > Affiliate Links
If my tip leads you to dollars, consider giving one to me! 🙂
I like SoundCloud! I finally uploaded all my voiceover samples into an album. Enjoy at your leisure.
Here’s my real-person experience with the Barnes & Noble Nook Color eReader
The NOOKcolor is half the price of the cheapest iPad, and even with a cover is less than half the price of the Galaxy Tab; it has a beautiful 7″ wide-screen-format full color LCD (which I actually find to be a better fit for my hands than the iPad); it comes with 8 GB internal memory and a MicroSD card slot for expansion (which the iPad doesn’t have); it has a full web browser (Google Chrome) that allows you to view anything on the Web that isn’t made with Macromedia Flash (which the iPad doesn’t support, either), and it has QuickOffice software that allows you to view Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. It allows you to drag and drop (with a standard MicroUSB cable, not the proprietary iPod/iPad connector) files such as audiobooks, music, photos, documents, etc. for listening and viewing (even in a photo slideshow) on the pretty screen. There are a few games (Chess, Crosswords, Sudoku), and you can use the Pandora app to listen to streaming music if you get bored of the music files you loaded into the device. There may be more “Extras” to come (free or for purchase), as well. As for the Galaxy Tab, I don’t need a portable videoconferencing device, and I don’t need another Android phone. I still like my Nexus One
As for the NOOKcolor’s web browsing capabilities, so I have watched YouTube videos, checked my GMail, caught up on Facebook and Flickr, read content on news websites, downloaded content from the Barnes & Noble store (some free or 99¢ public domain books) and free ePub download sites, and managed my Netflix queue. Primarily, though, I enjoy the NOOKcolor for reading e-books. Go figure! I’m not a big gamer, so I don’t care about iPad games designed for the accelerometer, and I don’t expect to do much document creation on a tablet, so I don’t miss iWork. For my intents and purposes, the NOOKcolor does everything I would want the iPad or Galaxy Tab to do— for half the price.
Bitter? Not really; just disillusioned. I still ♡ my NOOKcolor, and here’s why:
So, there’s my honest opinion about the NOOKcolor. I’m glad I got it. I chose it carefully over the e-readers from other manufacturers such as Amazon, Apple, and Sony. I would recommend the NOOKcolor to a friend. Or to you! And, of course, because I care about my friends, and about you, “Gentle Reader,” I’m warning you of its shortcomings as well.
Did this review help you? Did it save you $300? If so, would you reward the time I took to write this for you by giving me a small donation of even $1? I work hard on these blog posts and I do them without sponsorship from tech companies or advertisements. If you like, please give.
*P.S. I just have to laugh at the television ad with the woman reading her Kindle
Before I compare websites where you can download e-books in the EPUB format, I should tell you that I just got a Sony Reader Pocket Edition Silver PRS-300SC
First off, I found that PDFs are difficult to read on the Pocket Edition. I discovered this when I went to my local library’s digital download site and downloaded four books by Nicholas Sparks — all formatted in the same way by Warner Books in PDF. The margins were huge, the font size small, and the font face’s x-heights very small. (To oversimplify, x-height is the difference in size between capital letters and lowercase letters. Fonts with small x-heights look classy, but are not readable at smaller sizes.) These books were impossible to read at the default “small” size on the Pocket Edition. Not only that; the printer’s crop marks were visible, which made the margins even bigger since what I saw on my screen included extra margins that shouldn’t be visible to the consumer.
I had to set the text on these PDF books to “medium” size to make them readable. That makes the type large enough, but it breaks the formatting. Chapter headings show up two or three pages into the chapter rather than at the beginning of it. Lines occasionally break early or, worse, words break from one line to the next.
No doubt, PDFs like these might be readable on a larger Reader, such as the Daily Edition, but I prefer the compact simplicity of the Pocket Edition, and I think digital libraries should make their digital books look good on smaller devices. Instead of offering PDFs of hard cover books, perhaps they could offer PDFs of paperbacks, because they are formatted to be more readable in small form, where you will find thinner margins and more readable fonts.
Ideally, a text should be readable on any device. I have been a proponent of device independence for years now, and I suppose I knew that PDF was not a device-independent format, but reading PDFs on a small device really made me see it. I suppose that is why the EPUB format was developed with e-book readers in mind. Unlike PDF, EPUB e-books are designed to be readable on screen as opposed to on paper. I notice that, with the EPUB format, I don’t see misplaced chapter headings or lines and words breaking up. I notice the default font faces and sizes tend to be bigger and more readable; for instance, the font sizes are a couple-to-four points larger, and the font faces may have larger x-heights.
I’ve been experimenting with several EPUB download sites this week. I also searched the web to see if there was anything written comparing EPUB download sites, but I couldn’t find anything. So here is my — albeit limited — comparison of the EPUB books I’ve downloaded from (in alphabetical order) epubBooks, Feedbooks, Google Books, the Greater Phoenix Digital Library (powered by OverDrive), The Gutenberg Project, Smashwords, and the Sony Reader Store.
When I download EPUB books from the Greater Phoenix Digital Library, which offers books from OverDrive, I don’t know what I will get from book to book. One is readable at default size while another is more readable at medium size. EPUB books from OverDrive offer the benefits of the EPUB format I listed above, but there is no standardization. Still you can get some good EPUB books. At the time of this writing, though, the selection of EPUBs is limited; there are only 653 EPUB titles while there are 15,831 PDF titles.
When I download EPUB books from Google Books, I notice typographical anomalies due to OCR scanning errors. (OCR stands for optical character recognition, a program through which a scanned image of text is run to convert it from a picture of text to actual text.) Due to these uncorrected OCR errors, nonsense characters may appear on the page, lines may be broken in strange places, and letters might be missing here and there. Free, yes, but not very readable. On a positive note, Google offers a way for readers to report scanning errors so they can improve Google Books for the public good.
I actually made my greatest discovery while away from my Sony Reader. I had my Google Nexus One smart phone with me (as always) and I searched the Android Market for a good e-book reader. Being unimpressed with FBReader, I downloaded Aldiko and was blown away. Not only does it have a great user interface and even a way to download free and paid books directly in the app; it has a partnership with the best EPUB library I have found yet— Feedbooks. I downloaded an EPUB book from Feedbooks to read on my Nexus One and I loved the formatting. Very nice and clean. Interested to see how Feedbooks EPUB books would look on my Reader, I downloaded a few and put them on. Gorgeous! Almost every book I’ve downloaded from Feedbooks has the same formatting, or I should really say, style. Seeing the same style across multiple titles might bore some people, but I appreciate the beauty, dependability, and readability of the Feedbooks style. In addition to being an EPUB resource, they are a publishing platform, and they “consider that the structure of a text is very important.” It’s all about structure, baby! Not presentation. Yet, by offering EPUB books with solid structure (XML) and readable style (CSS), they make for a very nice presentation. I might even think of publishing something with them. (P.S. Feedbooks did not pay me to write a glowing review of them.)
I also discovered Smashwords through Aldiko. Like Feedbooks, it’s a place to get both free and paid e-books (in EPUB and other formats) and it’s also a publishing platform. I don’t like their site as much, though, nor do I like the style of their EPUB e-books. It seems fairly similar from book to book, but it’s not as elegant and readable on my Reader as the e-books from Feedbooks.
When I looked at the first pages of the EPUB books I downloaded from Feedbooks, I saw that most of the texts were actually from The Gutenberg Project. So I went to the source to see how I liked their EPUB downloads. Their downloads page for each title says the EPUB download is, at this point, “experimental,” but I found the e-books I downloaded to be just as readable and error-free as those from Feedbooks. They just didn’t have as pretty a style, in my opinion. Still, it’s not so much about style as it is about readability, for me, so I consider Gutenberg a good place to download EPUB books.
Speaking of EPUB books, there is actually a site called epubBooks, and went there to download a couple of books as well. I was surprised to find that they did not have A Room with a View or even anything by E. M. Forster, but they did have Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as did every other place I went to. I found it to be error-free, at least in the first pages I viewed, and simply styled. I don’t like their site navigation as much as others, but I still consider it a decent place to look for EPUB downloads.
The last place I went to download EPUB books, ironically, was the Sony Reader Store [closed March 2014]. One of the reasons I wanted a Sony Reader is because I am a cheapskate* who would rather borrow books from the library than pay for them. Unfortunately, the Sony Reader Store does not have any free books. They do, however, have two different editions of Frankenstein for 99¢ or less (and, inexplicably, some that cost even more). I don’t see any reason to pay for an electronic book in the public domain that I can download free elsewhere, but the Sony Reader Store does make for a seamless process of browsing, downloading, and installing e-books in my Sony Reader Library. It’s probably ideal for people who are not comfortable with downloading and file management, because the Reader Library application takes care of that for you when you buy books from the Sony Reader Store.
For the sake of good reporting, I plunked down $1.94 for two editions of the same book— one published by Mobile Reference and the other published by B&R Samizdat Express. The publication by Mobile Reference was formatted just like all the others: flowing text in a font readable in the default “small” size on my Sony Reader Pocket Edition. The publication by B&R Samizdat Express, on the other hand, was styled with a font size that was unreadable in the small size, and it had bigger margins than any of the other editions I had downloaded.
*Actually, when I just have to have it the day it comes out, I’ll buy a book and donate it to the library after reading it. I’ve donated a lot of books to the library over the years, but mostly I just borrow nowadays. Speaking of donating, if this article helped you make some money-saving decisions, then please consider donating a dollar or more to my blog. Thanks!
