E-Book Tips

Reading Your E-Book Online 

Once your book has loaded, click the mouse anywhere on the text (but NOT on any hypertext links). You may then use the arrow keys and the "Page Up" "Page Down" keys to move through the text.

On a hand-held device or an e-book reader there are up and down buttons or bars to help you move through the text.  

Searching for Quotes or Other Text 

Want to find your favorite quote in a book? After fully loading the text onto your computer screen, just open the find box on your web browser (ctrl-F) and enter the text you wish to find. The last word is truncated, so you can type "child" to find child, child's, or children.

You can also use the find box to jump down to the author or title you desire in a long directory.

Hand-held devices and e-book readers have special find functions as well as special functions for bookmarking text and adding notes.  

Saving Free Books 

Once you have a book fully loaded on your computer screen, you may save it to disk by opening the find menu and choosing "Save as." Then select a directory in which to store your book, give it a name, and choose the format in which you wish to save it. You can then burn your favorite books to a CD if you like.

If you save a book as an .html file, clicking on the file name will open your web browser to view the book from your computer just as you did over the Internet. You can also save the book as plain text (*.txt), which will take up less room on your computer. You can then open the plain text book with any document viewer or editor such as your word processor or Wordpad that should appear as an "accessory" file in your "Program" directory.

You can also use a file translator program to translate a plain text file into one that you can use on your PDA or e-book reader. E-book reader software is described elsewhere in this section on e-books.

If the book you wish to save is in .pdf format, you just have to open the free Adobe Acrobat Reader version 6.0 that is probably loaded on your computer if you use the Internet. Then open the file from the Adobe Reader version 6.0 should be used for Palm OS 4.o and up and has the added enhancement of Large Print viewing and audible or the equivalent of a Talking Book.