Where to find ebooks of your favourite authors online should be an easy question to answer.  Unfortunately in the UK we don’t have the Kindle Amazon store for a large, good value selection of titles and UK specific online bookstores are hampered by a myriad of formats and questionable ebook pricing.  There are some rays of light appearing though and hopefully things will only get better as more and more people feel the ebook love and start reading on digital devices.

There are really 3 options for ebooks for your readers in the UK – the good the bad and the ugly.

The Good

Starting with the good, there is a vast amount of books available in almost any format you could require for books that are now out of copyright.  This means that all your favourite classic novels and authors can be downloaded for your ebook reader free of charge.  The main repository of this wealth of content is Project Gutenburg – a volunteer project to digitize all out of print books.  There are currently around 30,00 titles to choose from and are available in various formats.

Another free option is google books. There are around 500,000 free ebooks available to download to your device in PDF or plain text format.  Again these are out of copyright works and your free to download as many as you’d like.  Just use the advanced search function and select full view to see the books that are available in their entrity.

There are also many other sites out there that have these out of copyright books available and often in a better format for your particular ereader than PDF or TXT so have a google search and see if there is a specific site offering classic books in a pre formatted way.  E.g.   www.mobileread.com offers ebooks in a variety formats like BBeb (LRF) for the sony Reader, .MOBI and ePUB.

The Bad

And now onto the bad.  The music industry seems to have finally got the message that DRM on music files is hurting the industry and is moving away from copy protection – after all, it only really hurts consumers who buy legally – illegal downloaders have already stripped the DRM off the files.  So now music lovers can enjoy a single format (MP3) on any device they want without restrictions on those files.

Unfortunately in the bad lands of the ebook market DRM still rules the roost and to compound the problem there is no one standard format – proprietary formats like AWZ, MOBI and BBeB (LRF) rule the day.   Buy a book for your sony reader but want it for your iphone too?  Your out of luck.  Lose your Sony Reader and buy a Kindle?  Say goodbye to your ebook library and buy them all over again.  There have been some moves in the right direction of late with Adobes ePUB format looking to be the front runner for an industry wide standard.  Disappointingly its still laden with DRM but at least its supported by multiple devices and could well prove to be the “MP3″ for ebooks.

When it comes to places to buy ebooks online in the UK both whsmith, waterstones and borders sell ebooks in the ePUB format.  This is great for being able to download the latest releases direct to your device although pricing can vary – many of the ebooks available are actually more expensive than the paperback counterpart.

US online stores like mobipocket and the sony connect store for Sony Reader owners can also be a good place for bargain books although it can be tricky to get around the US only restrictions on some books and stores.

The Ugly

Piracy.  The DRM that plagues digital files exist because people share digital content online and the owners of copyrighted works don’t want them too.  Here at thinkeink we can understand both points of view.  Be that as it may there are some instances where you want to get hold of an illegal file.  Say you have bought one version of a book but need to use it on another device you own.  Well there are places you can find this content.

• Torrent files – sites like Pirate Bay and MiniNova list ebooks
• Newsgroups – alt.binaries.e-books & alt.binaries.e-book.flood
• IRC – Undernet #bookz