1 Comment on "which ebook readers can you rent books on?"
Elfwreck said on Sep 15th, 2009 at 6:57 AM:
You can’t “rent” ebooks, because any movement of an ebook to your machine is “copying” the book, not borrowing it.
However, there are many sites with free ebooks (manybooks.net, feedbooks.com) and lots of publishers are now offering free versions of their books as a way to inspire sales of the paper books, and some authors prefer to release their ebooks with a Creative Commons license (generally meaning, anyone can copy it as long as nobody charges money for it).
Which is the best ebook reader depends on your tastes. E-Ink is a wonderful display format; it looks almost exactly like paper and isn’t hard on the eyes the way computer screens are. But it also doesn’t have color, and is expensive technology. And e-Ink readers have different options as well, and read different formats of books.
has comparisons of different kinds of readers and their availability.
(For myself–I have a Sony PRS-505, and I love it. But I knew exactly what I was looking for in a reader; it’s best for you to look at what’s out there so you aren’t disappointed if the one you buy doesn’t have the one feature that you really care about, but the competition does have that.)
You can’t “rent” ebooks, because any movement of an ebook to your machine is “copying” the book, not borrowing it.
However, there are many sites with free ebooks (manybooks.net, feedbooks.com) and lots of publishers are now offering free versions of their books as a way to inspire sales of the paper books, and some authors prefer to release their ebooks with a Creative Commons license (generally meaning, anyone can copy it as long as nobody charges money for it).
Which is the best ebook reader depends on your tastes. E-Ink is a wonderful display format; it looks almost exactly like paper and isn’t hard on the eyes the way computer screens are. But it also doesn’t have color, and is expensive technology. And e-Ink readers have different options as well, and read different formats of books.
has comparisons of different kinds of readers and their availability.
(For myself–I have a Sony PRS-505, and I love it. But I knew exactly what I was looking for in a reader; it’s best for you to look at what’s out there so you aren’t disappointed if the one you buy doesn’t have the one feature that you really care about, but the competition does have that.)