Did you download an e-book from internet having an extension of .lit and were wondering which software to use to open it. It opens with Microsoft Reader that is downloadable free of cost from Microsoft site and many other sites like download.com etc. This is the only reader available amongst many others which has Clear Type Technology which means the characters will appear on your screen as they appear printed on a book when you read it. You can also download free Text-to-Speech ad-in from the same location if you want the book to be read by computer for you. The benefit is you can just open the book and turn on the speech, close your eyes and keep on listening to it. the voice and accent are clear enough to understand. There are some e-books available at Microsoft site that can be downloaded free of cost which are Encarta English Pocket Dictionary, English-French and French-English Dictionary, English-Italian and Italian-English Dictionary, English-German and German-English Dictionary, English-Spanish and Spanish-English Dictionary. All these files have an extension of .lit and the download by default takes them to My documents/My Library folder and beauty is the moment you download an e-book with .lit extension it automatically starts appearing in Microsoft Reader Library from where you can select the book of your choice and start reading it.
The worst part is it is a proprietary product of Microsoft, you have to register it at Microsoft for which you need to have a Microsoft Passport, while registering it asks for your details and then you can start buying e-books online from Microsoft site. The standard e-book publishers, most of them, publish their books in .lit format too, to cater people using Microsoft Reader as an e-book reading tool.
It works in all variants of Windows starting from Win95 and Pocket PC Handheld devices using Microsoft CE. Navigation feature remembers where you stopped reading book last time and bookmarks it automatically so that when you open it next time, it straight away starts from there and also you can use multicolor bookmarks and full book search feature. You can personalize any e-book in Microsoft reader by using multicolor highlighter, inserting drawing, changing font size, and adding personal notes wherever you want. It works on a low end Windows PC having as low Pentium 75 MHz microprocessor with 16 MB RAM consuming 19MB hard disk space (the Reader takes hardly 3.6MB rest is used for installation purposes), VGA 16bit display color and a mouse or any other pointing device. To install you just need to download it from the site and double click on the file downloaded, follow the instructions on the screen. Just keep on checking the Update from Microsoft site time to time if you are using Microsoft Reader eBook.
The other readers available across the internet are Adobe Reader, Hiebook, Instant ebook, Mobipocket, Gemstar/Rocket ebook, and Palm Reader. Problem is all these readers use different formats and very few support multiple formats. The main ebook formats are .pdf (Adobe Reader), .lit (Microsoft Reader ebook), .prc (Mobipocket ebook), .pdb (Palm Reader), .rb (Gemstar ebook), .kml (hiebook), .htm (HTML), .exe (Instant ebook), .doc (Microsoft Word Book) and .txt (Plain text).
Happy e-book reading.