With the launch of Amazon’s new Kindle (currently only available in the USA) and Google’s Book Search service designed to run on i-Phone and Android phones E-books are getting a lot of press at the moment. Speaking at the launch of the Kindle, Amazon Founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said: “Our vision is every book, ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” This is quite a commitment!

Recently Nintendo released their 100 Classic Book Collection which Contains 100 classic books from authors such as Austen, Dickens, and Shakespeare. You might think that the DS screen is a little small for reading books but we’ve tried it and it’s surprisingly easy particularly as you can change the text size.

So how can you jump on the band wagon? Well you don’t need to go out and buy a dedicated e-book reader although they are an excellent solution (if a little expensive at present).

Most “modern” devices including laptops, mobile phones, portable games consoles and e-book readers can display PDF documents. Some devices are more convenient than others; reading a complete book on a 5cm screen might be a little difficult for some but being able to search for relevant text or information on the go could be invaluable. Bite sized revision notes here we come! PDFs are also very accessible so they cover a lot of bases in one technology.

Another format that many devices have no problem reading is plain old text (.txt) files. Project Gutenberg and their affiliates have over 127,000 texts are available for free on their website. To search their database go here: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

If you prefer to listen to a book or need to make it into a podcast then you can convert it using free software such as DSpeech.  DSpeech will read to you or convert the text into an mp3 which can be loaded onto a computer, portable mp3 player, uploaded into Moodle or embedded into learning materials. DSpeech does sound a bit robotic at first but you do get used to it after a while. Other voices can be purchased from various companies a quick search engine trawl will find them.