Ebooks for PDA: Portable Knowledge

One of the greatest things about the age we live in is the accessibility of knowledge. Digitized information allows us to store books and other reference material in the smallest of locations. Ebooks for PDA are a perfect metaphor for our age.

Electronic texts (often downloadable for free) are highly compact sources of information. Because the electronic information takes up so little space, you can fit thousands of texts onto a single compact disk; and you can do the same with your PDA. Think of it as an Ipod for literature; instead of buying dozens of paperbacks and carting them around, you can download them as digitized information and carry them in your pocket. Your PocketPC can often hold a hundred or more works at one time.

Best of all, there are lots of sources for downloadable e-texts. Project Gutenberg, which was born at about the same time office computers were, was designed to make e-texts available to the general public at no cost. You can go to their website today and download one or a thousand from a huge library of works, and the library grows by several texts each day. University of Virginia's website is another good place to visit; a project to put a literature library online has resulted in the availability of hundreds of out of print or impossible to find works.

If you go more for bestsellers, though, you can always visit Amazon or Barnes and Noble online and purchase e-texts. Digitized bestsellers are often cheaper than paper copies, and you can download them straight to your handheld computer. Or you can visit one of hundreds of small presses online that deal in self-published texts. There are probably more texts available online today than exist in the Library of Congress.

If you're looking for something to run your e-text information, a handheld computer supporting PDA software is your best option. Versatile, portable, and inexpensive, its many features will support many areas of your life as well as your e-text needs.