I have been reading books in digital form for some time now. It started with using my PDA to access my Bible using Laridian’s PocketBible. Once I got used to the convenience of reading on a handheld, it was a natural jump to ebooks.

I started out reading on my Windows Mobile device and continue to do so because the one thing I have with me all the time is my phone. The e-reader software that I used back then was Peanut Press, which was later bought buy Palm, and then bought again by Barnes & Noble.

Lately, I have been testing a free program called Freda, which uses the increasingly more common and popular ePUB format [wikipedia]. With all the e-reader and tablet talk these days, there are a lot more options for accessing ebooks and ebook libraries as well as new hardware form factors.

For now, I’ve settled on managing my ebooks locally (rather than in a proprietary marketplace). I have found a couple tools that help make this easier. The first is a desktop e-reader application called Stanza which can also do some basic format conversion. They have since been bought by Amazon (you see the M&A theme going on in this marketspace) and development seems to have stalled since the Big A have their own Kindle platform to promote.

The other application that I have been making good use out of is Calibre which is a library management application. The real power of Calibre is its ability to convert ebook formats intelligently with pretty good results. It is also able to sync and manage all your ebooks, but I haven’t really gotten into those functions yet.