No longer an e-virgin

Having spouted on as though an expert on e-books, I realised that there seem to be two types available: one which is just a pdf essentially and the other is a more malleable pdf, in that it can transform itself to fit into various screens and is known as an ePub book. This is the one you need if you plan to put it on your mobile and is the industry standard.

Anyway, I decided to buy a cheap ebook and got this gem from the Mills & Boon site.


The site was very user friendly and displayed on the pink band that both paperback and e-book were available. Both priced at a very reasonable £1.49 (that is including the required VAT for ebooks). Mind you there are only 82 pages. They also showed me how to download my free ebook reader from Adobe which I duly did. This I think is just a pdf and not epub so you can only read it on your computer screen or an ereader.


It is really a screen of text that you scroll down with chapter breaks. You can make the text quite big and quite small. All in all I felt Mills & Boon were very helpful and consumer focussed.

When I went to Random House site called rBooks , I am not sure that I found it quite so helpful. I wonder whether their website is directed at people who are more publishing savvy rather than general public.


You see the paperback for a Random House novel. They call it trade paperback, which just means paperback to you and me. It is priced £11.69. There is a section at the bottom which says other editions where you see 'hardback, cd and e-book' and you have to click to the one you want.

When you click e-book, you find it priced at £19.64 (10% less than the hardback which is currently published - I should have mentioned that the paperback isn't due out until November).

Seems a bit bonkers to me. What I really wanted to illustrate was the not so user-friendliness of the site. It is assuming that the general public know things about the booktrade such as hardbacks coming out before paperbacks. That a different format is called an edition and so on.

Anyway, I have displaced enough time already. I am off to read my Sicilian Wedding.

The only good thing to come out of this blog is that I have learned how to save screenshots. If you t00 want to know, watch this. What it didn't tell me was that I had to use the printscreen button on my actual laptop rather than the separate keyboard I normally use.