If you want to read ebooks on your home computer, you certainly can. Generally ebooks come in several formats that you can read on your computer. By computer, I am referring to any Microsoft desktop or notebook system running Windows, Linux, or Macintosh operating systems.

File types: TXT, RTF, DOC, PDF, HTML, XML, SXW

DOC
Word Document Format
Microsoft Word files are quite simply files written and saved in a proprietary format developed by Microsoft. Fortunately, you don't have to have to buy Microsoft Word in order to read these files anymore. Regardless of whether you are using Windows, Linux, or a Macintosh, you can hop over to the Open Office project. You can download and use Open Office free of charge. It is a free Office Package including a free word processor. It works in Linux, Windows, and MacIntosh.

RTF
Rich Text Format
RTF is a text format that preserves special formatting and text types such as bold or italic. Word will actually save its files to RTF, but you don't need Word to read RTF files. In Windows, you can view them in Word Pad which comes free with the Windows Operating System. In Linux you can use many free programs to view them including Open Office.

TXT
ASCII text
A txt file is just a plain simple text file. ASCII text files can be read by virtually anything. The bad thing about ASCII text is it doesn't allow the use of any special character types or anything. Because of this, if a book has italics or bold fonts or fonts of different styles or sizes, all that information is lost when it is stored as an ASCII text file. For many books though it is a great format for distributing them and you may often find books in this format. All of the books in the Gutenberg project are in this format for example. There is a wealth of material out there in Ascii text format, more than you could ever read.

PDF
Adobe Acrobat
The great thing about Adobe Acrobat is that it can preserve virtually any document formatting you can imagine so documents distributed in this format will be displayed exactly as they were intended. Another great thing about this format is that the Adobe reader software is free. The bad thing about Adobe is that it is sometimes difficult to convert it to other formats or get it into a format where you can edit the document yourself. There are readers for portable computers now that can read Adobe files, but the adobe files are often larger than their other counterparts. As memory gets cheaper and cheaper allowing portable devices to have relatively large amounts of memory compared to just a few years ago, this is becoming less of an issue.

HTML
Hyper Text Markup Language
HTML is the format used to make the pages you see on the internet. The great thing about HTML is that it can be read by any web browser. So it has the advantage of ASCII text that it can be read on virtually any computer, but unlike ASCII text, it has the ability to keep formatted text like Bold and Italics. It can also even have pictures viewable in the document. In fact, this page that you are reading right now is an HTML document. All this is done with special combinations of characters in a text document that are interpreted by the program that displays it. The document itself contains only standard ascii characters and uses these special combinations to represent any non-ascii characters. Also, many of the programs that are used to convert documents for handheld readers can use HTML as their input format. HTML also supports pictures and links to other parts of the document which allows for a lot of flexibility in creating the document.

XML
Extensible Markup Language
XML is a method of using tags to define structured documents. How these tags are interpreted is dependent on the applications that read or write a particular XML file.

ODT/SXW
Open Office Format
Open Office will let you save your document to almost any format mentioned on this page. They also let you save to their own format ODT. It is based on the XML standard which lets you create highly formatted documents. Since it works on all the major PC platforms, it would be a great way to distribute ebooks. Of course Word doesn't read ODT documents even though Open Office can read Word's files. I have also noticed the documents saved in this format can be much much smaller than a comparable Word document.

Palm Reader
If something works well, and you can buy it, why reinvent the wheel? Using that philosophy, Palm purchased the Peanut Press. Since that time they have made a noble effort to make sure you can read files in this format on most platforms. That is the only reason I post books in this format here at HANDebooks. You can also get popular best sellers from their website in this format. This is an important aspect of making ebooks successful in the future. They also provide a free converter to allow you to create your own documents that you can then read using their reader program. The converter program uses its own special file format call PML. Similar to HTML it uses special codes to represent special character types and image locations in the document. The resulting file only contains standard ASCII characters similar to an HTML file. While you could read it on a PC, it is really not intended for that. Its only purpose for existing is to be transformed into an ebook to be read by the Palm/Peanut reader. Once in this format though, there is a palm reader application for almost every platform, including the PC, and best of all its free. It isn't open source though, which is really the only strike against it.

Open Ebook Standard
A group was formed that created an open standard format for ebooks. The standard is based on XML. As I understand it, it doesn't provide any sort of security for the documents distributed in the format. For this reason publishers probably won't be distributing many of their books in the format. They still believe for some reason that their is such a thing as a secure format. I guess if people tell you that enough times you begin to believe it is true. Perhaps other books may be distributed in that format, but the other existing formats already provide lots of options. It would be good to see a true standard succeed though. Open Office also stores documents in an XML based format, but I do not know if it is compliant in anyway with the Open Ebook Standard.