Making eBooks Work, Part 3: Palm Digital Media

[Jeff Kirvin]

http://www.writingonyourpalm.net/column020520.htm

Palm Digital Media has been around longer than just about any other handheld ebook provider, and their catalogue is packed with big names. What keeps their customers coming back for more?

I still remember the beginnings of Peanut Press (they changed their name to Palm Digital Media after being bought out by Palm, Inc.). In late 1998, I heard about a new company trying to sell new, secured books readable on PalmPilots. I went to their site, downloaded their reader, installed it to my PalmPilot Professional and started reading H.G. Well's War of the Worlds, the first book they offered. I loved the experience, and went back a short time later to buy Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, which I'd loved in paperback a few years before. Thus began a relationship with Palm Digital Media that continues today. I've bought more ebooks from them than all other ebooksellers combined, and I keep going back.

Palm Digital Media was the first commercial ebookseller I'd noticed, and I'd been looking. I didn't care for Adobe PDF offerings because, like most people, I prefer to read away from my PC. Rick Bram's PalmDoc format was a revelation to me, in that it allowed me to read things longer than 4k memos on my PalmPilot. But the only things I could find in PalmDoc format were classic public domain works. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of classic novels, but I wanted to read modern works as well.

Palm Digital Media gave me and all other PalmPilot users (and eventually Pocket PC users as well) that opportunity...

Read the rest here.

[Jeff Kirvin]

http://www.writingonyourpalm.net/column020520.htm

Palm Digital Media has been around longer than just about any other handheld ebook provider, and their catalogue is packed with big names. What keeps their customers coming back for more?

I still remember the beginnings of Peanut Press (they changed their name to Palm Digital Media after being bought out by Palm, Inc.). In late 1998, I heard about a new company trying to sell new, secured books readable on PalmPilots. I went to their site, downloaded their reader, installed it to my PalmPilot Professional and started reading H.G. Well's War of the Worlds, the first book they offered. I loved the experience, and went back a short time later to buy Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, which I'd loved in paperback a few years before. Thus began a relationship with Palm Digital Media that continues today. I've bought more ebooks from them than all other ebooksellers combined, and I keep going back.

Palm Digital Media was the first commercial ebookseller I'd noticed, and I'd been looking. I didn't care for Adobe PDF offerings because, like most people, I prefer to read away from my PC. Rick Bram's PalmDoc format was a revelation to me, in that it allowed me to read things longer than 4k memos on my PalmPilot. But the only things I could find in PalmDoc format were classic public domain works. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of classic novels, but I wanted to read modern works as well.

Palm Digital Media gave me and all other PalmPilot users (and eventually Pocket PC users as well) that opportunity...

Read the rest here.