This is my first post, so apologies for any kind of errors :) My most favourite hobby is reading, and I would like to post my first mouthshut.com comment in a section related to reading.


I’ve always remembered being a serious reader. Starting from around age of 8, Tamil novels were my passionate timepass. Moving then to English modern novels, I don’t remember a period when I lost touch with reading. Crime, classics, fiction and fantasy were all equally enchanting. (These days, we see kids brought up to spend all their time either in front of TV or computer games, and it kinda makes me sad that book reading isn’t the best thing taught to them...will they ever understand what they miss?)


When I bought my first computer way back in 1996, I was of the idea that it was all about programming and gaming, and least applicable to reading (all that you got to read those days was just the technical documentation stuff). Yet, reading over screen was some kind of fun. Of course, I never had the slightest idea that you could use computer for storing books electronically, although every week I had to do some document writing - one kind or another.


Shortly then, I happened to understand Adobe’s Acrobat product, and it was an all-new opening: this meant that we could have single PDF documents that contained hundreds of pages, distributed as read-only - which was typical of a paper-printed novel. Around in a year or so, under the same lines, the era of digital publishing took off, with electronic document formats or simply eBook formats being published by a dozen vendors who offered a free readers and a basic range of titles. Reading has never been the same for me.


I have chosen Microsoft reader as my eBook platform. I now own a collection of about 350 books in my reader library. These include titles that I have fancied from way back in past, right to the most recent publications by my favorite authors.
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What I like about digital reading with Microsoft reader is:
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- the ability to browse through the library and locate a book easily. I’ve never lost an eBook!
- the font’s typeface is close to reading a paper version
- the smooth & soft full-screen+navigation controls.
- the integrated encarta dictionary proves absolutely great: I’ve always been lazy to use a dictionary for a new term.
- smart sticky notes that I can edit/delete and save. No more dirty underscores or pencil scribblings!


There’s also the audio playback facility with reader but I don’t use it much.


Quite a proportion of the eBooks collection with me is free (from Virginia University’s eText collection mentioned before here by Ameet, Microsoft’s monthly free eBook release, and a couple of other sites). Of course, I continue to spend $ buying eBooks - I do believe that if I need to get fast and rich reading contents parcelled beautifully, I need to pay. Major sources of my premium eBook titles are my ebookmall.com club subscription and bn.com-amazon.com’s eBook catalog.


Of late, I own a HP iPAQ PocketPC, and that has made things even better. (This came with a price tag of 300 USD, but it’s a not just a eBook reader - it’s a complete PDA). I’ve installed Microsoft reader in this, and with a capacity of 64 MB of storage and average battery recharge cycle of 10 hours, iPAQ has become my default reading medium - over the bed, above, under - wherever! I carry a collection of atleast 25 books wherever I go, and that is absolutely wonderful.


Now, I am also beginning to listen to AudioBooks, though it isn’t the same fun. For readers of dynamic contents such as news, there are AvantGo channels (News portals such as CNN publish AvantGo content). AvantGo is a simple way to periodically download publications offline to your desktop/mobile computer, and read them on availability of time.


Of course, for a dry day, there’s the paperback edition. D-reading never gets as better as reading a paper book, but we owe ourselves the exercise of right to convenience :)