As an emerging sci-fi novelist (see my books here), I've actually been taking a vested interest in Ebooks of late. Of course, I've also been taking interest in them from the perspective that they've become yet another battleground in the widening war of media freedom, an important theater in the much larger war of user freedom.

Sony Electronics is to change the format of the ebooks it sells so that they will work on devices other than its own Sony Reader.

Though N800 is an Internet Tablet, it can serve as a very good ebook reader too, for those casual/semi-serious readers who don’t want to invest in a stand-alone ebook reader. But what truly makes it such a good candidate to be used as an ebook reader is the free software (GPL) FBReader.

There are plenty of places on the Web where you can find ebooks in the EPUB format, but what if you need to create an ebook yourself? Sigil can help you with that.

Say you just bought an Amazon Kindle or a Barnes and Noble Nook. You want to convert your eBook collection to .EPUB or .MOBI format. For this, install Calibre. The application not only provides you with a graphical way to manage your eBook collection, but also comes with a set of useful command-line tools. One of these is ebook-convert.

You can use a dedicated application like FBReader or Calibre to read and manage ebooks on your machine, or you can do it without leaving the convenience of the Firefox browser courtesy of the EPUBReader extension.

rms calls our attention to the problems of many current commercial ebook distribution models. Ebooks have many advantages compared to books but they also have many disadvantages. Yet, none of the disadvantages are somehow inherent in ebooks. (The link is a PDF.)

"Amazon, Sony, and others are all competing to control how, what, and when we can read with their competing Digital Restrictions Management technologies. Let's let them know that we won't buy their ebook readers until they get rid of the DRM!

Join us in opposing all DRM ebook readers and DRM ebooks by taking part in this action..."

"The Amazon kindle provides convenience, but at the cost of freedom. When you purchase a kindle, you must agree to use the Digital Restriction Management (DRM) system. Since all of the Kindle ebooks you purchase from Amazon are in their proprietary DRM format, you are also promising to not share them with friends. And, because you promise to not circumvent the DRM, there is no way to move them to another device or a computer. You are locked into the Kindle and you are locked into Amazon. If you try to move them to a new ebook reader or a computer, Amazon can end your service and remove access to the books you have already purchased..."

via http://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/1096 (instructions on tagging - Kindle Swindle )