With all the chatter about the best way to produce e-books for one format or the other, I thought this might be the best place to ask: What's the best way to read epub books on a Win XP laptop? I know someone mentioned a Kindle simulator. I am hoping there's a more common general-purpose word processor that can render the e-book in a readable fashion.
[Caveat: I am answering the specific question "epub on Win XP"] First of all, we are really talking about two different e-book file formats, one is "EPUB" used pretty much by everyone recently except for Amazon Kindle, and the other is "MOBI" used by Amazon Kindle. "Free" EPUB books can be read by a bunch of desktop software, including "the standard" which is Adobe Digital Editions -- which will also read commercial EPUB books that come with Adobe's flavor of Digital Rights Management. One interesting reader option for free epub books is EPUBReader for the Firefox browser which lets you read EPUB files from inside the browser. Two "word-processor-like" approaches to read/edit EPUB books are Sigil -- which IS properly an EPUB editor, and Calibre, which is a general purpose ebook format converter and librarian which also includes an ebook display softare and editor. Other sources of EPUB readers for the PC include "Barnes and Noble Nook for PC" and "Sony Reader Library Software." Re Kindle on a desktop, get "Kindle for PC", and/or get the "Kindle Previewer" Google on any of this stuff to find where to download it.