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For my WM5 PDA, I've always used uBook Reader. Fairly fast with a decent set of parsers and scrolling options, fonts, colorations, etc. Inexpensive, too.

I bought an old, cheap PDA (Cassiopeia BE-300), installed an alternate OS (Bee) and eBook reader software (the excellent Book Reader http://www.gowerpoint.com/. I've been using it for years solely as an ebook reader. It reads text, PDB, HTML, PDF, etc, from within zip files or without, on compact flash or internal memory. It's smaller than a paperback, I can read and "turn pages" with one hand in the dark, battery life is excellent. Anybody could probably set up something similar with most any PDA.

If it doesn't have the scrolling feature of ReadThemAll [narod.ru] then it's not worth having

uBook does this as well and it's pretty good (and configurable for different reading speeds). When I got my Windows Phone I was trying out all the ebook readers. The Palm-derived eReader is okay, Amazon's Mobipocket was my regular until it started hinking on a few file formats it was supposed to be able to read. I gave uBook a try - it's initially off-putting because it's obviously done by a serious geek because it has around five billion config options, even down to be able to tweak the sub-pixel rendering to suit the individual characteristics of whatever screen you are using. But it also does auto scroll, which is nice.

use Amazons Mobi-Pocket reader

I was using Mobipocket for a while but I found it often crapped out over specific PDB or even PRC formats created by other programs. Then I got uBook, which opens these files okay but has a less intuitive interface. However, I am liking its ability to tweak the sub-pixel font rendering and the autoscroll option. It's basically an evolved, advanced Mobipocket for people who don't mind 7 (!) pages of config options.

Ebooks will not become practical for most people until the reader costs little enough that you won't cry if you forget it on the bus.

At $400, you are trying to train people to carry around something more valuable than their cell phone. Unless this thing is supposed to stay home, out of harm's way. Which would be lame. $400? You can buy a portable DVD player for half that. Less than half, even! I understand about economy of scale and all that. But this is the kind of comparison Joe Blow is going to make.

I am already an ebook guy. I use uBook on my Pocket PC. (Great software, btw: http://www.gowerpoint.com/. Fan, used it forever.) Sure, the screen is smaller, but at 640x480 it's plenty sharp. OK, the battery doesn't last as long, but it makes up for that by being a PDA/web browser/media player too.

For $400, you may as well buy yourself a nice new PDA phone and buy a copy of uBook for it. Or get one of those new $400 mini laptops. There must be some free reader software for linux? Or move a Windows license to it, and use the desktop version of my preferred app.

But that's still only a solution for techies. Give the world a $100 reader, with no wireless BS.

This doesn't even address the media cost issue, but other posts have nailed that.

That's the program I use to read the illegal rips I downloaded from the Undernet on my Pocket PC (a Dell Axim X30 on which I would love to run linux if I had time to help the porting effort)... I use the green on black color scheme and I can get about 5.5hrs of reading on one charge. Use either the side scroll or the buttons on the bottom to change pages and I'm a much more efficient reader.

Downsides: hand-scanned books have some pretty fucking weird typos.. If I use wifi at all my battery time plummets. The selection on IRC is usually pretty good, but some obscure titles are understandably hard to find. I don't mind using IRC to get books, it's easier than the *NIX command line most of the time - but it's certainly not user-friendly in the cushy-gui or even basic web page sense. If you use an old version of ubook you don't need a license, but looking at the web page it looks like that may cease to be. $15 is pretty cheap for such a useful program. It's definitely the program I use the most on my PPC and I'll have to have a replacement before I flash the ROM for the Penguin Familiar. -g

Damn. A comma instead of a period. Gowerpoint

You get used to reading from a small screen pretty quickly, though I was never one for getting headaches from staring at a monitor too long anyway.

I use Book very often these days on my siemens simpad to read ebooks. The downside is it can't read pdf, but it can read any plain text format (html,rft, txt, etc) perfectly.

I did convert a couple of my ebooks to .rtf and i'm very happy with it. Good fonts, display rotoation, many many settings, optional anti-alaising, etc ..

check it out at http://www.gowerpoint.com/uBook_main.html

With a good PDA, you get better resolution than normal text...

I too am a huge fan of reading on the PDA but... even a super high res PDA screen isn't sharper than real print. Sharp ENOUGH, sure.

I'm DONE with paper, for the most part. uBook on my 640x480 Axim X50V is just sick, and even on my last iPaq (only 320x240) it was very usable.

What the world really needs is a cheap ebook.

- Screen at least 640x480, greyscale
- Good backlight
- CF or SD slot
- A few fonts w/ bold, ital, underline
- Software that digests open formats: Palm DOC, RTF, HTML, TXT

Basically, it would be uBook on a dedicated monochrome device for about $150. Kind of like the Cybook but slashed down to essentials.

ebooks won't really hit it big until they are cheap enough that you don't cry when you leave one on the bus.

Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because ... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...

First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.

The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.

One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.

Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time. :)

There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.

What do I use it for? What do I NOT use it for?!

reading ebooks every single day... in bed, on the couch, on the can: uBook
keeping track of miscellaneous bits of info (eg, project shopping lists): Noterrific
Listening to my MP3 collection, via earphones, over WLAN, while reading in bed: BetaPlayer
scientific calculator: Calc98
Getting online (via T-mo GSM phone & Bluetooth) anytime, anywhere. (In other words, I have Yahoo Yellow Pages in my pocket.)
All of my contacts and appointments kept in sync with home & work desktops: organizer software is built in but I bought Pocket Informant
Various games, of course
Keeping track of how much I spend on lunch: Pocket Excel
Taking notes in meetings: PhatPad
Storing every single number and password that plagues my life in a secure format: eWallet

Sure, it isn't as good as a laptop, but I can (and do) take it everywhere.

I am upgrading to one of the new VGA models shortly after they hit the streets. I have my eye on the Dell Axim X50V, which has specs similar to the HP 4700, but is less expensive.

I can't imagine not owning a nice PDA.

Skinnable, opens zip files on the fly, features listed here.

Skinnable, opens zip files on the fly, features listed here.

uBook is a free, full-featured book reader that is my current main reader. Versions are available for Windows as well as PocketPC.

MobiPocket Reader because I paid for several of their dictionaries (Oxford)

TomeRaider because I have a current copy of the Wikipedia with me at all times. It's an amazing, free resource. You have to compile your own version using the existing Perl tools, but it isn't that hard.

I like my Dell Axim X5 because it:

was reasonably cheap (I paid about $250 for it on eBay)

has both a CF and SD expansion slot (although just a standard SD slot, not a SDIO slot)

has a portrait screen with a nice backlight

The blurb from their site says it better than I could:

Book is a simple and lean, yet powerful ebook reader for Windows and Pocket PCs that can read HTML, TXT, RTF, PDB and PRC (not secure) ebook files. It can read directly from inside ZIP files, and supports BMP, GIF, PNG and JPG images. It offers many customization options including: Portrait and Landscape display, Choice of font type, color and size, etc....

I've been using pocketpc's for ebooks for years and after trying every damned reader I could find, this was by far the best I found - and on top of that it's free.

My favourite parts are being able to directly read zipped html and rtf files, as well as being able to rotate the screen and also the most usable implementation of auto scrolling I've seen. Its under active development - every request I've made to the developer has been implemented within a few weeks (which did wonders for my loyalty. can you tell?)

On the downside, it doesn't do pdf's, but pdf viewers are available for pocketpc (though imo, of limited use on the small screen).

If you use ebooks on pocketpc, and haven't tried this, I seriously recommend giving it a burl!

While having a big screen would be nice, you'll find that there are mitigating factors to smaller screen sizes (ie, portability).

What really matters is what software you run to read the books.

I myself have an old iPaq running PocketPC 2002... and my alltime favorite e-book program is Book which is fast, well written, and does a top-rate job at reading HTML, TXT (great for Gutenburg texts), RTF and a number of formats (save proprietary ones like PDF and LIT) ... and it does all this with cool bookmark features, builds it's own Table Of Contents and all that good stuff, including using ClearType... probably one of my favorite pocket utils of all time. (and I've been from an old Palm to this to Familiar Linux on the iPaq and back again)

It's the only eBook reader I use. Slightly confusing itterface to get used to, but very clean and simple. Reads many unencrypted text formats including ( pdb, prc, txt, rtf, html ) and can read into .zip archives and display covers/inline images.

Runs on windows and the pocketPC platform and is FREEWARE.

uBook download