My wife and I both have a Sony Reader so we've found a few tools worth mentionning, which may be useful to all Sony Reader owners. Some of these might also be useful to you if you own an eBook reader from another manufacturer, who knows?

We'll start with legit eBook sources. (What do you mean? There are other ways to get eBooks?)

• Free eBooks, short story and articles (my favorites)

  • Cory Doctorow (science-fiction)
  • Mur Lafferty (science-fiction)
  • Charles Stross' Accelerando (science-fiction)
  • Me! (if you understand French, and like science-fiction short stories.)
  • Wired Magazine
  • Subterranean Magazine
  • Your public library may lend eBooks, just like they lend paper books.

• Book libraries:

  • The Sony eBook Store
  • Fictionwise
  • JeLis.ca

But you will soon find that the world of eBooks gets wider if you become competent in the art of text files manipulation. I am not suggesting that you learn the internal of the PDF format. But you will have acces to a lot more books and texts if you know how to convert them to a format that is compatible with the Sony Reader. To help you in this tasks, many tools exist and most of them are free.

Before we start exploring the tools, let's talk eBook formats. The Sony Reader particularly likes the ePub format, but handle simple PDFs remarkably well. It performs a bit pourly when you throw a really complex or graphic-intensive a PDF file at it (and I find that the battery life decrease too) but in general I have not found myself limited too much by this. The most common operation you will end-up performing is converting files you get that are not in a format handled natively by the Sony Reader to either ePub or PDF. Here are some tools to help you with this task:

• Calibre is a tool that let's you convert eBooks to the ePub format and aggregate RSS feeds into an ePub file. You can schedule tasks so that when you sit in front of the computer in the morning, all of your favorite news sites have been aggregated during the night.
• Stanza is optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but still let you convert text files to the ePub format.
• Bullzip PDF Printer allows you to convert any printable document to a PDF. This is the easiest way to convert a web page or a Word document to a format that can be read by the Sony Reader.
• PDF Info is a tool that let's you edit the meta-data associated with a PDF. Since the Sony Reader sorts all of its content according to such meta-data, you will find that it is really important for it to be accurate. Sadly, not all the PDFs you find out there (even from legit sources) have proper meta-data.

To organize your eBooks, you might want to use a program that manages your library like iTunes manages your music library.

• The Sony Book Store application does a relatively good job. It's also the only way to get DRM-protected books from the Sony Store to your reader. But you would then trust Sony not to install any root-kit on your computer, right? Not that they would ever do that, would they?
• Adobe Digital Editions is an alternative to the Sony software. It let's you handle DRM-protected eBook in the PDF format, which the Sony Reader is supposed to handle (I have never tried it myself.) Those protected PDFs are the sort you might be able to "borrow" from your public library. The Ottawa library offers those, but not the Gatineau one. Otherwise, it's not too bad either at managing your eBook library.