If you already have a smartphone or tablet, you're set.  All you need is a suitable app with which to read your e-books.  You can also read e-books right on your


Desktop or Laptop.  There are programs that will allow you to read your e-book right on your old-time computer.  In fact, if your browser is Firefox by Mozilla, there is a plugin you can download which lets you read certain types of e-books right in the browser.





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Amazon sells thousands of e-books in their Kindle Store.   If you own an Android phone or Tablet, they will usually have an Android app for getting Kindle books, and reading them; if you don't, Amazon certainly makes sure you have every opportunity for downloading one for free.  You must establish an Amazon account (for which you only need an e-mail address)The free Kindle apps are perfectly good, but developers are constantly marketing improved apps which you have to buy (for a very modest sum, in 2013 anyway) that give you additional features.  Kindle apps are available essentially for free for iPhones and iPads.  Your Kindle book collection can be downloaded into your Kindle Reader, or your phone, or your tablet or your computer, but they maintain a copy for you on their website of every book you buy from them.  These are available anywhere you can get an internet connection.   Your Kindle Library is in the cloud, as they say these days.






Barnes and Noble's Nook app is on Verizon phones, and can be installed for free on Android tablets. iPhones and iPads too, have Nook reader apps.  On the Barnes and Noble website (which we will abbreviate to B+N) there is a page dedicated to their Nookable offerings, called the Nook Store.  Again, you have to set up an account with the website.  When you buy an e-book from there, it is placed on a list they maintain for you called your Nook Library.  On the plus side, your Nook Library is also maintained in the cloud, and you can get your book if you're visiting friends, if you can borrow a computer with an internet links, and a browser.  At the moment, you can only read certain books on the browser, using B+N's proprietary "cloud reader."






The Gutenberg Project (named for the inventor of movable type, Johannes Gutenberg) is a non-profit organization that has begun the process of putting Public Domain books of all sorts on the Internet.  Books in plain language are the easiest --by which we mean books with only text, and no illustrations, and no complicated typography, like boxes or tables.  These sorts of books are put on line in one of three different forms:
(A) Plain text.  This means there is only lowercase, uppercase and punctuation, and nothing like italics or boldface or anything.
(B) Html.  This is the form of basic text which is found on the Internet, and has (in addition to plain text) italics, boldface, underlining, numbered lists and bulleted lists, and hyperlinks.   This enables you to click on one place in the text, and be instantly taken to another place in the text (not always a good thing).
(C) Adobe Pdf ("Portable Document Format.")  This format has been around a long time, and permits very flexible formatting of a page, including graphics.  The big drawback to pdf documents is that you must look at the whole page or a part of it; you cannot repaginate, that is, you cannot change the size of the font, and be given a page in that font size; you have to look at the page as if it were a photograph.   Finally, the Gutenberg project provides, for some books,
(D)Epub format.  This is a format that is maintained by an international organization that allows essentially the same sorts of formatting as HTML: bold, italics, etc, and allows the user to resize the font with which he or she is reading, but also permits some flexibility in formatting paragraphs and margins and so forth, which makes for a better-looking page on the screen.  You can download any number of books from the Gutenberg project, or indeed any organization that provides books in any of these formats, or even other formats which you can look up on Wikipedia.  Unfortunately, you might not be able to read these e-books on either your Kindle or your Nook easily.   But you certainly can read them on your Droid, iPhone, or Tablet.  You just have to get a general-purpose e-book reading app, of which there are many.  Fbreader, Aldiko reader, and Moon reader are three.  But things change every day, and it might be possible very soon to read an e-book you got from any free source on any e-reader, including Kindles and Nooks.
  But the next few things you absolutely must do are


Manage your e-library, which means maintain a complete list of what you have, and ideally when and where you got them, and
Be able to filter your list by author, or sort it alphabetically, or by publisher, or chronologically.  The Kindle books by themselves, and the Nook books by themselves, are managed by Amazon and B+N respectively, since they don't want you getting mad at them.  The free books you might have got from Gutenberg Project or by making them yourself, you have to manage by yourself, because at least at time of writing, neither Nook nor Kindle are willing to host books from outside their systems in their book management.
 There is at least one piece of free software that focuses entirely on managing e-books, and functioning as an e-book reader, namely Calibre, which is freely downloadable.  It maintains your free library (and even books you bought from vendors other than Kindle and Nook), and even helps you get your e-books into your Nook, for instance, or your Sony Reader, or your tablet or phone.  Each piece of hardware (reader, tablet or phone) is different in how it connects with your central collection of free books on your computer, so a single method can't be provided here.  There is a button you click on in the software that says "Device", but some work might be necessary before your device is recognized by your computer, and then by Calibre.


In addition, and most excitingly, Calibre helps you actually make e-books from out of your very own materials.  If you have a document in MS Word, for instance, Calibre will convert it into an e-book in EPUB format, which can be read practically on any device, and certainly on a smart phone, tablet, or even a Nook.  (Nook is more hospitable to "side-loaded" books than Kindle, at this point in time.)

,  Some organizations, notably Smashwords, accept writing in e-book form (which must satisfy certain style guides, maintained on the Smashwords site), and will undertake to market your work for you, if you establish a contract with them.
To begin with, get one of the gadgets on which you can read e-books.
Get some e-books to read.
The whole concept of ebooks is changing daily, so some of what is provided here might be out of date even as you read it.
Look for freeware.
If you are an author, an e-book collection of your own work is easy to maintain, and is convenient.
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