If you have any desire to purchase ebooks commercially, you'll encounter DRM in some form. It may be unnoticeable, or it could be a major pain. This choice rests on the hands of the publisher or distributor. There are different levels of DRM, some as simple as file encoding that prohibits alteration of the contents, while others could place numerous restrictions such as number of times opened, or length opened, and it can also limit the number of different computers that can open the file. At some later point in this series on ebooks we'll examine digital rights management is more depth. It's a large subject that's quite interesting.

Now that we have provided a proper introduction to reading ebooks, we can move on to other ebook-related topics. Next time we'll look into the other side of the coin--writing ebooks and writing with your Palm OS device.

Heather Wardell received her first Palm handheld in 1997 (from a boss who couldn't get the hang of Graffiti) and has never looked back. She worked in banking as a systems analyst for four years, and then moved into elementary education, teaching computers at a private elementary school for four years. Heather is now a full-time women's fiction writer, and her first novel, "Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo" is available for free download through her Web site at http://www.heatherwardell.com.