No Kindle? NO PROBLEM.

As mentioned in my last post, my forthcoming epic fantasy novel The Gamble of the Godless is coming out this May/June as an eBook exclusive, available at places like Amazon and B&N.com and the Apple store. Now, I don't have an e-reader--a Kindle or anything like it--and it occurred to me to wonder whether I'd even be able to read my own eBook. Turns out that's not a problem.

All these readers have free programs that can be downloaded and put onto your desktop or laptop. It takes about three minutes and bingo, instant Kindle.

Here's what you do:

Decide whether you want Kindle from Amazon, Nook from B&N, or whatever. you can go to www.download.com and search for "eBooks on PC" or something similar and you'll get a slew of options. Probably the easiest thing is just to go to Amazon, B&N or Apple.

Download the program and install it. This took me about two minutes and is about as tough as downloading a song.

Once you have the program, you'll need to register it with whomever you're going to be getting downloads from (in my case, Amazon). That's another 20 seconds, provided you already have an account. if you don't, it will take a minute or two.

So after that, you can download stuff, including the free sample chapters from just about every book online (including a three of mine, and Uzee's latest).

Here's a screenshot of what you get when you install the program and click it open. You get a couple free books when you install the program, and I've added a few samples.

Click on the book you want and you'll get something like this:

This is the beginning of Fallen. You can modify the font size and brightness, and after a few seconds the bars across top and bottom go away, so it starts looking like a book:But if you want, you can modfy the words per line, so it stretches across your screen in something like magazine format (and I've dimmed the brightness a little too):
Anyway, if you've been curious about eBooking it but haven't wanted to splurge on $100 plus, this might be an easy stopgap. Plus, it'll allow me to read The Gamble of the Godless...