All right, you've actually gotten me to break down and consider downloading the two DTI E-Books

. . . without anybody having to rip the "run" and "impression" levers on the Heidelberg Windmill at the International Printing Museum from my cold, dead hands.

But out of pure morbid curiosity:

I see these e-books on the B&N site (presumably in whatever format works on a Nook), and on Amazon (presumably in whatever format works on a Kindle), but I also see them on the S&S site (with a button that just says, "ADD TO CART (DRM FREE)," and I also see it in the Google Play store. And none of them say anything about format.

Could somebody please get me up to speed on this?

 

Well I'm no pro, but lets just say you are reading these on your phone. If you buy it from Amazon, you'll read it in the Kindle app. From B&N you'll read it in the Nook app. And from S&S you could probably load it into whichever app you choose, or just the equivilent of iBooks for whatever weird non-Iphone phone you have there. GooglePlay I obviously know nothing about.

 

I wasn't an early adopter or E-Books mainly due to all the confusion I personally had surrounding the multiple formats. I liked the Dead Tree habit of collecting and organizing on a shelf... then I moved and decided that it was just not ideal if I continued to collect everything and would ever have to move again.

Flash forward to now, I've basically decided that an open source format like epub is just the way to go. You can read them on anything (My Android Phone for example) and I now have a library of books always at my fingertips anytime I'm in a "bored-waiting for something to do" state.

 

One of us!!!

 

Don't you have dial-up @hbquikcomjamesl? I'd be curious to know how long it would take to download.

 

GooglePlay also has it's own reading app, but I'm not sure what format it uses. That's what I mostly use, since I have an Android tablet I decided to stick with the one made specifically by Google.
I'm not real tech savy so I stick to buying from ones that have then reading app and the store together so I don't have to worry about format and compatibility. There are some books that aren't available on all of the apps, so if you can't find what you want on one app there is a chance it's on another. I've found that a lot of Titan's tie-ins and novelizations aren't on GooglePlay for example.
EDIT: That's the publisher Titan, not the Star Trek series Titan.

 

It would probably take a week or two (which wouldn't be very practical, given that my new ISP has a connect-time limit for dial-up accounts). Besides which, there would be the small matter of getting it to my tablet. Fortunately, we have broadband and wi-fi at work, and there's no problem with something as small as an occasional book or app.

I still find tablet computing to be a little hard to swallow. Even if it's sugar-coated.

 

I'm really surprised in the developed world in 2016 ISP's are still offering dial-ups connections. I'd laugh if it wasn't so backwards and stupid.

Why? they're convenient and bloody useful.

 

All the formats present the book to you in a pleasing way. You don't have to worry about one of them being worse.

The decision is between convenience & being locked into an ecosystem, or slightly less convenient and not being locked into an ecosystem. The easiest thing to do is to pick one of the commercial apps, install it, and buy ebooks from the matching website. They show up automatically, they sync, they're bound to your account so that even if you lose your hard drive you can get the books again whenever you want in the future, all that good stuff. If you go the epub route, you'll need to manually transfer files around and back them up yourself, but you aren't stuck getting all your future books from the same store.

Pluses and minuses - up to you.

 

However, I don't see that anyone ever satisfied your curiosity. AFAIK, there are only two remaining ebook formats from the great format war. mobi/azw3 and epub. mobi/azw3 are what most Amazon titles come in. azw3 is basically just an epub inside a wrapper file. Pretty much all others use epub. Definitely all the ones you mentioned other than Amazon. Many of those have their own readers but, since Star Trek titles are now sold DRM-free, I'm assuming you could read them with the reader software of your choice as long as it wasn't from Amazon. Of course, since you're just starting with ebooks, you probably don't have a preference, and would be likely be better off using the reader software from wherever you purchase the title.

 

Thanks, "bfollowell," I think yours is probably the most useful answer yet.

I think (1) I'll just order them out of Google Play (it seems the path of least resistance) and (2) wait to order them until October 7th or 8th (because as long as I don't start actually reading them until I at least get to the airport, they're in my vacation budget, just like the new physical books and "Christmas audition" CDs I'll be taking along).

 

In response to my line about finding tablet computing "hard to swallow,"

That's a pun. "Tablet"? "Hard to swallow?"
I even made it more obvious this time, with the reference to "even when sugar-coated."

Seriously, though, I much prefer banging away on a Unicomp buckling-spring (or for that matter, on the ETAOIN-SHRDLU of a Linotype) over trying to "thumb-type" on a touch-screen, especially since there's something about my body chemistry that doesn't reliably get along with touch screens.

 

They do make the keyboards for most tablets now.

I picked up a PDF companion to the first few Kate Daniels books, and it took me forever to actually get it onto an app to read it.

 

Fair enough, but buying ebooks in PDF is pretty rare.

 

Well, this was a free download the authors offered on their website. I don't think many, if any, stores sell e-books in PDF, but a lot of the freebies I've come across are.