With the Ebookwise Librarian open, go to the right side and click “create new”.You then browse to the html book, select it, make sure you have the title and author as you want them to appear and click okay.

Once that’s done, keeping librarian open, you then turn on your ebookwise, select online bookshelf and select the book you created.

As a side note, if you’re running Windows Vista, when you open Librarian, you have to do so by right clicking on the icon and selecting “run as administrator”.

Hope that helps!

A flash drive is an external memory device which can be a USB device or to work with the ebookwise, it is called a SmartMedia card.

The cybook is though incredibly light, with fast page turn rates. If only the button layout didn’t suck, the cybook would be the killer reader device.

The price point in Euro I heard is going to be 339, so if that price point remains in USD, you’ll be getting a deal.

My friend took some pics of the Bookeen as we were looking at it – in Flickr under “bookeen” as a tag, David.Orban’s photos.

My preferred ebook reader is a Tapwave Zodiac 2, a Palm OS device. The screen is smaller, at 3.25″ x 2.25″ in 320×480 resolution, but either native or through trivial conversion I can handle eReader, MobiPocket. PDF, HTML, plain text, and RTF formats. More important, I can do a vast number of things besides read ebooks with it. (And at $235 on eBay, it was cheaper than most of your picks). The Zodiac has a backlit screen, but it can be turned off entirely for reading out of doors.

I prefer to get content in HTML and convert it to Plucker format. Plucker is a free, open source offline HTML viewer for Palm devices, and there’s a viewer for Windows Mobile devices that handles Plucker docs as well.

I avoid PDF files unless it’s the only format a book is in: I have a very good PDF viewer for Palm devices, but it can’t automatically reflow text to fit on the screen, so viewing can be problematic.

And I don’t buy DRMed titles. DRM is far more trouble than it’s worth. I want to download electronic content once, and read it on whatever device I happen to have available. The lack of a standard format and DRM get in the way of that.

There’s more stuff in freely available, non-DRMed editions I want to read than I have time for, so I’m not exactly missing out on anything by not buying DRMed books.

Also, PalmDoc and eReader are not the same thing.

The PalmDoc file is a plain text file, compressed with a form of RLE compression to save space in memory. Doc readers decompress it on the fly as they display it. It was originated by Aportis for the Aportis Doc reader. Aportis is long gone, but the format was reverse engineered and it the closest thing to a default standard for text files on a Palm device.

eReader was originally the Peanut Press Reader, created to display ebooks in the format created by Peanut Press, an early ebook publisher. Palm bought Peanut Press and made it the Palm Digital Media division, and called the reader PalmReader. Palm later sold the Digital Media division to Motricity, who renamed it eReader. eReader format is a markup language that can handle images, fonts, and hyperlinks. PalmReader/eReader can display both PalmDoc and eReader format titles. There is a newer format similar to PalmDoc called zTXT which is gaining popularity. zTXT documents are also plain text, but using a higher compression method for better space saving. Viewers that display them use a Palm port of Zlib, which provides gzip compatible compression, to decompress the files for display.

If the answer is mostly PDF then you have no better option than the Iliad. Yes, it’s expensive but worth every penny as you won’t be messing around with file conversions and the like. Plus, it’s an open platform so there’ll be plenty of community support if the vendor is proving to be real slack with providing fixes and enhancements.

Otherwise, the remaining options will boil down to what format you wish to support from the various devices and publishers. This will be restricted to mostly fiction and non-technical type publications (without conversion).

Like the author of this article, I have spent many research hours looking for the perfect device: from pocket PCs to tablets and e-ink readers. It doesn’t exist yet and there are sacrifices to be made with any decision. I settled on the Iliad and have no regrets.

[D]oes the eBookwise store have the same discounts as the Fictionwise store? If not, it might just be another way for Fictionwise to make $$.

The last time I paid attention, eBookwise offered its books at the “Buywise Club member” discount – so the prices there are better if you’re not interesting in paying for the Club membership.

Fictionwise does offer the eBookwise format for multi-format books, but not the encrypted books. I suspect they figure if you’re going to buy the DRM’d book, it’d be easier to do it directly from the eBookwise site.

It’s always interesting to read these comments – I find I’ve had more problem with the $15 converter program than with the free one from ETI. Oh, sure, I’ve used the $15 converter for “throw-away” books that I know I won’t want to keep. But I’m anal retentive enough that I like to tweak how my books look by copying the text into an RTF document first (e.g., left-justified, no curly quotes, no paragraph indents, page breaks at each chapter). Twice, I’ve had special characters “hidden” in the HTML cause a book to stop converting with the $15 converter.

Plus, since I’d be converting the books to RTF anyway for my Sony Reader, RTF just works best as my “base” file format anyway. :)

And – just an FYI for those considering using the free AmberLIT converter – it deletes the files special formatting (like italics). It may also (I might be mixing it up with the PDF converter) put a paragraph return at the end of every line, which is majorly annoying!