Here's how you do it. You go to a site, like Project Gutenberg, and download a text file copy of a great book, like say Moby Dick.

Now you have a copy of the entire book on your hard drive. You can open it in any word processor and read it directly if you want. You can format the text with the word processor to make it easy to read.

Another alternative is to download the free Microsoft Reader software that will allow you to read properly formatted books (including new books that you can buy if you want) and also download the free software that will convert text files to Microsoft Reader format from Word. The final result is very satisfactory for anyone who likes to use his computer for reading books. The text size is adjustable, and the "feel" of the page is very comfortable to the eye.

One thing that I have discovered about many text (TXT) file copies of ebooks, is that there are hard carriage returns embedding into the text at the end of each line. If you happen to have a screen setup that lines up with the hard returns it is okay, but I have yet to find a single book where that works comfortably for me. I converted a couple of books to Microsoft Reader format, only to find that about every other sentence would end early, making the reading process far less enjoyable. So, I found the following solution:

After downloading it, I open up the TXT document in Word. I then do a REPLACE (under the Edit menu) throughout the entire document, where I replace each case of a DOUBLE carriage return with another string (e.g. xxxpp) that is unlikely to be anywhere in the text of the book. I next simply remove all of the remaining carriage returns in the document by once again using the REPLACE function. (I replace the returns with nothing, which effectively deletes them.)

Finally, I have a document that doesn't have a single carriage return in it. So, I do one more REPLACE throughout the document, where I replace the abritrary character string that I put in on the first run, with a double carriage return. The final result is a text document that has all of its paragraphs marked by a double return, and the rest of the lines are all free to wrap to fit whatever screen size I have. I then save this as a new file, retaining the original unchanged, just in case something went wrong on my first attempt. The new file works very well for reading directly in the word processor, or for converting to other formats for readers like Microsoft's.

So whether you download free books (and hopefully give a donation to the site that provides them if you use it a lot), or buy the latest releases in an ebook format, you have a whole world of reading just waiting for you. Don't miss out!