You've Already Got An E-Reader, Folks.

I have Google set up to alert me for most stories having to do with ebooks and ereaders, and the constant debates and debacles over ereaders, and reviews over the latest gadgets tend to make my eyes roll. Especially, I get a little vexed about the marketing push that has convinced most consumers that they need yet another stand-alone electronic doodad to read electronic books that they can only buy at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or some other special location that they need a gold key and a password.

No, scratch that. I’m not vexed, I’m flat out pissed off. All this hype and technical bullshit is fogging up an issue is that very, very simple, and making it far more complex than it needs to be. It’s making it confusing for readers who don’t grasp the technical stuff as well as I do, and that really pisses me off, because when the grasping, greedy marketing gurus make it deliberately confusing in order to keep readers loyal to a certain company, I see red.

Fact: I’ve been reading electronic books for ten years. I didn’t have to wait for a dedicated jee-whizz reader to come along. I’ve been reading them on my Palm Pilot all that time, and now I read them on my Palm Pilot and my Blackberry Storm cellphone. I don’t own a dedicated reader (I can’t buy a Kindle here in Canada, and I’m not in a hurry to buy a Sony Reader, or one of the dedicated readers…why haul another gadget around?)

Fact: If you own a smart cellphone, or iPod Touch, there’s a better than 98% chance that you can be reading ebooks on it inside twenty minutes. And you don’t have to buy special software. Mobipocket Reader is free. Fictionwise’s e-Reader software is free. Both of those will load onto these devices. Mobipocket in particular will convert just about any format file you care to name and load it onto your device, allowing you to read any file…any book, no matter who publishes it.

That’s an incredibly important point. This frees you up from the slaved devices that Kindle and B&N are putting out. And it allows you to acquire books from Fictionwise.com (who don’t steal back their titles just when you thought it was safely loaded onto your reader), and other sources, and load them as you please onto your device and read as you go. If you have a Blackberry, as I do, you can even shop and impulse buy on the go via the Mobipocket reader, and be reading a new book inside three minutes, just like the Kindle, if that’s your thing.

Don’t let the marketeers fool you into thinking you have to spend hundreds of dollars on a slaved, shiny device just to read ebooks. You don’t. It’s all bullshit designed to confuse you. Like I said, I’ve been reading ebooks for ten years, and *still* don’t own an ereader. And I can buy an electronic book from anywhere I happen to be standing in north America. So don’t let them frazzle you with technological terms. Go native and get what *you* want from the pixel pond: Really good stories at a price you like.

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