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Best PDA To Read e-Texts On?
GabrielStrange writes "I've been thinking for a while now that I'd like to own some sort of portable device on which I could read e-Texts. This device should be able to read both simple text files (i.e. Project Gutenberg e-Texts) and more complex formats, like Plucker, Acrobat or Microsoft Reader. It should have a fairly high-res display with a backlight that would be easy on the eyes... but doesn't particularly need to be a color display. I'd like it to work with at least one (if not both) of the machines on my desktop, which run Linux 2.6 and MacOS X Panther... And to use a USB port. And I'd like it to have a built in, rechargeable battery, because I already have enough devices to worry about batteries for.
And, of course, I don't want to pay very much for it. Anyone got any recommendations for such a device? It's proving to be almost impossible to even obtain an actual list of devices that have these features."
If you drop the battery requirements, you can probably find a few PDAs that will fit the bill.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
You can probably pick up a used iBook for under $500. I can't imagine wanting to read large volumes of text on any PDA.
TODO: Something witty here...
Try the new zaurus posted here on slashdot. Now thats got a biig screen.
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
zaurusis what you are looking for.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
I think national semiconductor made some of them along with other companies. You should be able to pick one up second hand off ebay, or from liquidation companies. Most of the devices I saw ran windows CE, but they could probably run Linux with some hacking.
Plus you'll have a lot more control over font sizes, orientation, etc with Linux. Even simply using a web browser would make for excellent reading at that resolution, and you could whip up some scripts to format whatever texts you like for HTML in no time at all.
(Posted via proxy -- I wish Slashdot would unban my home IP subnet. When will Slashdot be done beta testing their IP subnet-based karma system? Not all of us work at VA and have our own subnet.)
I use a Toshiba e805 (same as the e800 but with some image software thrown in). It has 128MB of built in memory and both a SDIO and CF expansion slot (along with built in 802.11b) so you can load it up on storage or (as I did) add bluetooth to access the web via a cell phone. Its got a very nice 480x640 screen that is perfect for reading text on (its larger then most PDAs) with a 2MB ATI graphics accelerator. Granted you need to install some third party software to get the default mode to be anything other then 200x320, but once setup right its very slick. If you poke around you can also find 480x640 skins for many apps such as PocketPlayer, MS Media Player, PocketDV and others.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
While I'm sure I'll be mocked (since Palm OS isn't Linux), my T3 is great for ebooks.
:-)
+ Palm Reader is all good, and plenty of other choices.
+ Large library available (http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com/)
+ Small device, great resolution (320 x 480, potrait or landscape).
+ Lots of other software
- Anti-aliasing is mediocre at best. Resoltion does make up for it somewhat...
- T3 battery life is very mediocre. Perhaps a Clie instead, if this is a concern.
- Not cheap.
Cheers - James
Ha... nice try, but no such device exists. You can only have 2 of the 3 items... Take your pick of:
1) Good resolution
2) internal battery
3) low price
The Zaurus series is pretty much a geek's wet dream. Being open source, you can pretty much get any readers you would like, they use rechargable Li-Ion batteries, USB, and you can even connect them via TCP/IP over the USB port...meaning essentially if the OS works with USB you shouldn't have much in the way of trouble.
I read Red Badge of Courage and a couple others on my SL-5500 during downtime at work, and it was fine for me--and my vision is pretty far from 20/20 (though it is fine with glasses). The 5500s can be gotten pretty cheap these days, though I imagine the new 6000 series with the 640x480 screen would be wonderful....*drools*.
Just my 0.02$
Gee, you don't want much do you? Minimise your standards and you'll find something to fit them.
Awww... I wanted to explode - GIR
I use a Sony Clie PEG-N760C (hope I'm remembering that right). It was state-of-the art a couple of years ago and back then it cost me about $250. I've read e-texts on it using small antialiased fonts and it looks pretty good.
Bonus: built-in MP3 player. I know that's nothing special today but back then it was fairly unusual for PalmOS devices.
http://www.eink.com/news/releases/pr70.html ... Whenever it's available!
I just can't relax or get into eTexts. Give me the printed word on paper, please.
Trolling is a art,
What about the Sharp PDA (Zaurus ZL-6000) that was just reviewed? It supposed to be open source (access to lots of formats) and have a decent screen.
I've used my Tungsten for the last 12 books I've read. With an SD card, you can fit all you like and the screen legibility is great, although it may be that I'm just used to it. I know some people have issues with it.
You may not think color is important, but the change I made from b&w to color (Palm IIIxe to TT) improved legibility incredibly. The increased resolution was also a great factor.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you less.
I would strongly suggest finding an older used Sony Clie. I'm using a Clie S300 model. It's B&W with a 160x160 screen. Admittedly, this is low res by current PDA standards, but the text is still very readable.
The best aspect of this model is that the contrast on the screen is superb and excellent for reading. I previously used a Palm Vx for the same tasks, but comparing the screens is like comparing night and day. Even with the backlight on, the Clie's battery (internal LiIon) lasts for several hours.
As for reading software... I'm a little biased. I'm the author of Weasel Reader. It runs on Palm OS and is under the GPL. I wrote it specifically for reading Project Gutenberg texts, but you can read any text file. See http://gutenpalm.sf.net for more info.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
My lovely SL-5600 is up to the job.
It only costs $289 from Amazon (if you live in the US), and you can easily download a decent plucker reader for it.
Oh, and it has a 400MHz xScale processor, and runs Linux. And Java.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I actually use Palm Reader because the selection of books available in that format is large, even though it's proprietary. (It's about day's work with debuffer to crack the encryption BTW, though it's more than my life's worth to actually say whether or not I've done it.)
Palm Reader has a great built in reference mode. I have the entire unabridged Webster on it - fantastic!
I've configured the side button (usually to activate the voice recorder) to launch the reader so if I'm waiting in line at Safeway it's about 1 second to go from boredom to reading a good book.
On the down side - you can read for a few hours, but don't expect to read all night without a recharge.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
works well with linux(mac os shouldn't be a problem) :)
lots of reader software available(not sure about microsoft reader for a palm)
it's got a usb cradle for syncing/charging
fairly long battery life(no week long hikes in the mountains tho)
the screen is easy on the eyes, at least for me, and this tends for by subjective.
cheap on e-bay.
if you back off the cheap requirement get a newer palm based device, they are worth it. and some of then even play mp3s while you read
My guess is that a Sony Clie NX60 (which you can get for like $130 refurb) would fit your needs well. uses USB, syncs with Macs & Linux, hires 320x480 display, good backlight, rechargeable, replaceable LiIon battery, Plucker works great on it.
This is usually the important thing. If you look at the palm Range, it goes from cheap to heavy.
For simple text, the Original Zire would be perfect. However there is no true PDF reader in Palm that I know of, and have never heard of Microsoft Reader.
I was especially interested in using it as an ebook reader when I first got it. It retailed for about $600 at the time, but the specs look more like the current crop of $200-$300 PDAs, so you can probably find one for less than that on EBay...
Anyway, it's not great as a text reader platform. The screen is high enough res to render text in a crisp -- but not jagged -- and nicely readable format. It's Pocket PC (2002), and runs both MS Reader and Pocket Acrobat Reader well enough. There are various utilities for browsing text files. It has a built-in Li-ion battery and USB connection.
So what's the problem? It's just not as nice as a book. I keep a few books on it just in case, but rarely use it as an e-reader nowadays. The screen is too small, and you're forever flipping to the next page. And if you need to skip forward or back to check something, you're often skipping a lot of pages. It's also not easy to find a comfortable reading position, and it's no use in bed.
All not necessarily relevant to your needs, but from experience...
I would definetly recommend the Tapwave Zodiac, the orientation of the device, and the size of the screen make it perfect for ebooks.
I have a Sony Clie which I use to read e-texts all the time. I use j-pluck to download the BBC news website (with images) and pop it onto the CLie using HiRes plucker to view the pages.
This works very well, I get a couple of hours out of a battery and the whole download and sync operation works slick-as-hell with pilot-tools.
recommended.
My school is 100% e text book this year with all books in pdf format. I tried reading it on a pocketpc 2002, but it doesn't look too good. Is there anything short of a super thin laptop that i can use?
The new Zarus being the better of the two (for running Linux and a nice screen resolution) but more expensive vs. the under $200 IPAQ 1900 series which is still very nice thanks to ClearType for reading. My wife has a 1900 series, I've got a 2200 series. Both are USB and contain rechargible batteries, but also REPLACEABLE batteries for those extra-long hiking trips into the woods.
The Zarus, of course, was reviewed earlier today- and as an IPAQ user, running linux instead of PocketPC 3.0 and a REAL 640x480 screen were tempting.
Plus, the Zarus is more likely to be compatible with your Linux Box, though FTP and Webservers are available for Pocket PC now to be able to transfer files from just about anything.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I read tons of Gutenberg e-texts on my Sony Clie SJ 22. Good res, great backlight, cheap, etc. etc,
Jog dial is very handy for reading e-books.
I use makedocw and cspotrun to create and read files.
I have recently been reading a large number of etexts on my Palm Tungsten T. It seems to have great, rechargable battery life, and a nice screen.
I used to use Weasel however I have recently ditched it for Plucker because I can read a number of html texts with images.
Although I can't read books on a computer screen (I think my eyes will start bleading after the first two hours) I seem to be able to read them without any discomfort on a PDA screen, probably because it is LCD or something.
I imagine that a Tungsten T would be relativly cheap these days, I got mine about a year ago when they were relativly new, but won it in a contest so I didn't have to pay for it (alas, now that I am in University I am a less exceptional programmer than I was in high school)
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
I too am looking for a e-book reader at the
moment. Should have specified a minimum screen
size. Something the size of a Star Trek datapad
would be good.
Looking around on Google, there are eBook
readers that aren't PDAs, they generally have
slower screen-refresh rates.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Regular batteries are strongly recommended, so you don't end up with the iPod problem of batteries that cost so much when they die that you might as well chuck the thing out.
Its all about the screen. I have been reading ebooks exclusivly for the last 2 or 3 years. I really like my palm t3 for its nice large screen. Its nice not to have a nightstand light keeping the wife awake when I read at night. Also nice to always have a book with ya when your get bored and have a minute or two to kill. I think there are plenty of PDAs that will fulfill most of your requirements... cept maybe price.. cuz you didn't say how much you wanted to pay..:)
i don't have a pda, you insensitive clod.
I have the Sony TG-50, and reading ebooks is what I spend the most time doing with it. While the organizer functions are useful, I really purchased it for the ability to store books and manuals. The combination of Palmreader, Wordsmith, and Acrobat Reader allow me to access everything from text to pdf's.
The only issue you might have with it is the price, but the backlighting, multiple formats, and memory stick capability are well worth the extra money for me. 128MB can hold a lot of text.
Always found the Sony Clie to be very readable. Good high-res (for PalmOS units, 320x240) displays and nice bright backlights. Won't do Microsoft Reader, but etexts and stuff should be fine. There's a lot of good PalmOS software (including specific eBook readers and whatnot), and relatively good Palm support for Linux in general. New ones are relatively expensive but you should be able to get older ones (like my PEG-SJ30) online for around $150 or less. Bad things include their reliance on Memory Stick.
If you don't like Sony, or you'd rather have a Windows-based one or whatnot, the Dell Axims are very nice. The X3 is very small and includes nifties like built-in WiFi. Plus, they're damned cheap - the 300MHz Axim X3 (doesn't have wifi) runs $199 retail. Hard to beat, pricewise. ASUS also makes some neat-looking ones too.
mrg
It might exist but it isn't necessarily cheap. Tablet PC's can do all of this, and it can replace a laptop. Since it is a full-fledged PC, you can run anything you could on any other computer. On top of all that, it's thin, light, about the footprint of a pad of paper, and has a rechargeable battery.
Only downside is you pretty much have to run Win XP Tablet Edition, unless there's some port of Linux that I don't know about...
The CLIE PEG TJ-35 or TJ-25 are available as remainders and have the best screens I've encountered for E-Book Reading. High Res, paper white, jog dial, very easy to read for extended periods of time. The battery life is middling but the purchase of a external battery pack from PCMOBILE.net resolves this problem.
check out this article as well http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000391.php for other nice clie's for ebook reading.
In comparison the TJ-37 has a somewhat irregular screen.
Just pick up a palmOne Zire 21. Less than $100, B&W 160x160 screen, USB, 8 Mb storage. It'll handle all the formats asked for, and runs quite a long time on its rechargeable battery.
Crisp display, long battery life. I've read all of my books on this since buying it.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I bought a Sony Clie SJ-22 a few months ago mainly for reading. I got it for $170CAD, which works out to about $120USD these days. It'd be even cheaper now. So if you can find one it's a great deal. I use Plucker almost exclusively, but I also have Acrobat's reader and AvantGo installed too.
:)
As far as the hardware is concerned, it's a very sharp little package, really great screen (excellent backlight, works great in direct sunlight, and is colour), and has enough built-in memory for my purposes (16MB). Its only expansion option is a Memory Stick slot. Original Memory Stick though, so you're limited to 128MB sticks (or at best, 256MB, but you can only access 128MB at a time). And of course it's Memory Stick as opposed to a more ubiquitous format like SD/MMC, which I find quite irritating. I don't use the Memory Stick slot
It has a built-in rechargable battery which seems to last me a good long while. I've taken it out to the cabin for a week at a time and it didn't run out of juice (no electricity at the cabin, and I don't use those 9V portable chargers or anything). I haven't been able to find a cradle for it, unfortunately, which is irritating. This particular model was discontinued ages ago.
I'm really happy with it, and if you can find one it'd probably be an excellent deal and would do probably whatever you're after. Maybe a newer model would be okay too, I don't know.
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(Either action or death.)
I use my Axim x5 advanced to read whatever pdfs, docs, or txts I feel like reading while I'm traveling around. I like it although I do believe the screen is a bit small. I can read hours and hours on it while listening to music. I'd highly recommend getting something that is 480x640 just because of the larger screens.
They have a decent resolution (for pda's) come in b&w or color, and go for pretty cheap on ebay. Can anyone who actually owns one of these comment further on the clies?
I've had a Sony Clié SJ-30 for a year and a half, and I love it! It is an excellent size for my hand and pocket, it has a nice, bright 320x320 color display, a jogwheel for scrolling through pages, and a memory stick slot for plenty of storage.
I use Weasel Reader for reading Gutenberg Etexts, Mobipocket Reader for reading etexts from Baen books, as well as Plucker for web clippings. I also carry along Ultralingua dictionaries so I can look up words when reading French language Gutenberg etexts (ahoy, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea!)
My Sony makes a fantastic e-book reader.. I probably use it for that function as much as for anything else. At 320x320, the screen is easy to read, the high-res fonts are very comfortable, and the backlight is great. It fits easily into my pocket, and I carry it wherever I go. It's USB based, and I sync documents to it from my Red Hat 9 Linux system without problems.
Honestly, any modern Palm OS based device should have USB and a good 320x320 screen, and any of them that you look at should make a good EReader. The Sony's may still be particularly good with their jogwheel, however.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
As for software, if you can hunt down a shareware copy of TomeRaider you are set. The software has excellent compression, and the reader, while not having all the bells and whistles of more bulky software, is fast and reliable. You start out with a basic .txt file, and the software will convert it into a .pdb file, readable on your PDA.
Makes a great network stumbler and portable jukebox too. Mine has a 30GB drive on it, running Linux. You can even use the hibernation features by spanning a dead partition using LVM. It needs a little more power (or better video chipset) to do video well, but it can handle smaller mpegs pretty well using xine.
I don't prefer it to a book but do like it better than my desktop's 17" LCD for lengthly reading. Having it in hand makes the experience more book-like. (Every try taking a 17" monitor to bed? Don't answer that.)
Recently, I purchased a Sony CLIE SJ20 for this exact purpose. After a fair amount of research, I decided to go with a monochrome model for the extra battery life and reduced cost. After reading a ton of professional and epinions-style reviews of this model, I came to the conclusion that it was definitely the best choice for these purposes.
The best feature is the black and white monochrome screen which happens to be amazingly easy to read in most any light. Oh, and it's quite cheap, also. I snagged mine for a measly 50 bucks on ebay in like-new condition, and I am very happy with it.
Which only meets some of your criteria...
Kyocera 6035:
Resolution is lower than you specify, battery life is good, back light is dreadful.
Still, I've read many a book using it. And since I always have my phone with me, I always have something to read.
"Always carry a book with you, because you never know when you might be arrested." -- Emma Goldman
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Since the 6000 has come out the price on the 5600 has dropped into the reasonable range. If you get a USB cable from SerialIO you can charge the Zaurus from any USB port without lugging along the power supply or cradle. You could get the DB9 cable as well and use it to config a router on console in a pinch too...
Once you get the WiFi card for it, you can just ftp your files over to it or whatever you want to do.
OK, the question's been answered. Someone archive this discussion.
Technically the IBM Workpad Z50 and Vadem Clio (Sharp Mobilon Tripad) are PDAs, but they're clamshell notebook style. The Clio/Tripad has a flip-over screen that turns it into a tablet, but otherwise the specs are quite similar: 131MHz vr141 MIPS CPU, 16 or 32 meg internal storage, CF slot, PCMCIA slot, RS232 port, internal modem.
You'll have to put up with the lack of a USB port, but RS232 works well for small transfers, and flipping CF cards is fast when you want to move a lot of data.
Both the z50 and the Clio/Tripad have big screens with excellent contrast. They share great battery life, about 8 hours on the stock battery if you're not running a power-hungry PCMCIA card. (wireless) Optional double-capacity battery packs are available for the z50 that really do achieve 16 hours. Both can run the hpcmips port of NetBSD quite capably, but for reading text you might as well keep the stock WinCE.
Personally, I'd use the Clio because of the flippable screen. Holding it by the hinge side is very comfortable, and the touchscreen allows easy page-turning even while in tablet mode. The z50 is stuck in a clamshell shape and uses a pointing nipple.
Did I mention that both can be had on eBay for under $200?
I have a Palm Vx which does all of this. It has 8 MB of RAM and I haven't even filled up 2 Megs yet even with all the games and texts I've downloaded. It is certainly cheap. It recharges every night when you set it in the cradle. And charge life is about 14 hours of continuous use. I used to think the screen was too low res at 160x160 since I had tried reading on it and didn't like the results. But I've found that reading on it is fine if you use the right software. Since I downloaded Palmreader I have been reading Cory Doctorow's stories from Craphound.com and loving it. Ive only evaluated three readers but out of those three, Palmreader is by far the best.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
I use my Clie (SJ30 a year old), its color, excellant backlight, 320x320, very readable. Along with the latest beta of Plucker, which can use anti-aliased fonts. Battery is rechargable and it syncs via USB. Probably the lastest comparable Clie is circa $150. I use it daily, and I love this solution, I've read several books this way, but mostly use it to read downloaded news and other articles. It's great, but of course paper is easiest to read. But then I can't carry 60 books and 7 newspapers in my shirt pocket.
Not yet. Maybe soon. God knows I've been waiting long enough.
We publish e-books, and for demonstration purposes I use a Sony Z505 Notebook with a high-res 1024x768 screen. It's small and you can type on it, but battery life sucks. It was very expensive when new, but probably cheap now. The screen sure is great; it's comparable to a mass-market paperback, two pages side-by-side.
But it's larger than most PDA's, even though small for a notebook/laptop. Weighs 3.75 lbs. Did I mention it draws down its battery the moment your back is turned?Mike Ward, www.hidden-knowledge.com
#9069054
(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)
Your ignorance is showing. I won't even bother to give examples.
I actually found the Texas Instruments 92 (now the Voyage 200 to be quite good for reading e-books on, and the batteries can last quite some time.
All you need is the Ti Ebook Reader.
As for the ebooks, I grabbed a bunch of the project gutenburg books, and converted them over. I probably still have them on my HD, if anyone wants them.
Unstoppable object, meet impenetrable wall.
Impenetrable wall, unstoppable object.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Fearing the backlash of criticism from Slashdotters, I begin...
I have a Windows PocketPC-based PDA, the Dell Axim to be precise. I've been using Microsoft Reader and Adobe Reader for some time now to catch up on some reading. Besides the usual bitching about Microsoft, it's not a bad solution.
Resolution: It's good resolution. Antialiasing is ok. Screen is quite clear. Viewing in outdoor light is not so great. All in all, better than the Palm III I had before.
Storage: unbeatable - I have CF and SD ports, so I can store tons of books.
Portability: Great. Battery is rechargable and lasts quite a while.
Usability: Microsoft Reader is ok. I've had some problems opening larger books (takes quite a while) but I haven't been able to compare on a newer Dell Axim to see if it's my PDA or MS Reader. One interesting feature is with MS Reader you can license your books for up to 6 machines. So, I have reader installed on my laptop and desktop too.
Extensibility: I haven't researched other reader formats (e.g. Gutenberg, etc.) so I don't know if there's software out there for PocketPC that uses these formats. I have looked into the PocketPC developer's kit (free from MS) so it could be done.
All in all, I can read books, do other generic PDA functions, plus listen to MP3s, watch videos etc. And, you can get refurb Axims from Dell for a considerably lower price than new.
Zero power consumption, very portable, works in both bright sunlight and darker rooms.
And if you're ever stuck in the woods without any TP? Well hey! You're set! Try THAT with your Palm (pilot).
You probably don't want an iPod for long text. I converted a couple of books from Project Gutenberg to a string of hyperlinked 4k Note files, and it was kind of a pain...
This sig intentionally left justified.
I used a Handspring Visor Neo for a year and a half, but unfortunately it wasn't as durable as I'd hoped it'd be. So, I traded up to a Tungsten E purchased from target for $199, and have been nothing but happy. not a huge screen (320X320) but a very clear display, and a built-in rechargeable battery. Plug it in for 30 minutes and its fully charged, on average. SD expansion slot, syncs with MacOS, Palm Reader is free and reads .DOC files as well as the Palm Digital Media store's books. Can't really go wrong with this device. Just make sure you get a hard case for it...it comes with a crappy little flipcover that barely protects anything...
get a Gp32 [english.gamepark.com].
Yes, I know it's only 320x240 resolution. But the display is nice, and the machine is versatile (with plenty of software to supplement it. And the SDK is open-source. Why not?
For 160 bucks, you may as well put your emulation and your ebooks in the same device.
I have a Palm Tungsten T. The screen is fine for indoors, but not good outdoors.
The Palm Tungsten T2 is pretty much the same PDA, but has a "transflective" screen that is better than the screen on the T, both indoors and outdoors.
Both are 320x320, and you can get very nice text on it for your ebook. I use it with Linux, no problem hotsyncing with the USB (I use J-Pilot).
You can also use SD or MMC cards for storing your ebooks; you can get a lot of reading material on one of those, and you can just use any USB card reader/writer to write the ebooks onto it.
If you check eBay, you can get a T2 for $250 or so. You can get a T for less than that.
The T3 has the advantage of a screen that is 480x320 when you have it fully open. It has a 400 MHz processor, so it's fast... but the battery life sucks.
You can get a device from Palm called the "Power To Go", which is just a lithium ion battery sled. You dock the Palm in the sled and the Palm draws power from it. You can fully recharge a drained Palm at least twice on a fully charged sled, or run the Palm from the sled to get very long run times. With one of these you could fly to Japan and read continuously, without running out of power.
If you can stand a pixelated reading font, an old Handspring Visor makes a decent reader. It runs just forever on two AAA cells. That's what I have used for reading novels on a plane to Japan. But you specified a high-resolution screen for smooth fonts, so the older 160x160 greyscale devices are out.
If you had to pick just one to buy, I'd say the T2. If you want the cheapest one, get a used T from eBay.
Be sure to get a quality leather case to protect it. I use the EB flip case, the one that uses magnets to hold it closed.
By the way, I read more novels as ebooks on my Palm than I read as paper, these days. And I have even started reading Slashdot on my Tungsten (using a PalmModem).
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Does anyone know of any good ebook software for PPC platform? The Microsoft reader is gorgeous, but of course it only reas its own native (useless) formats. Ideally I'd like something with nice anti aliased fonts like MS Reader. TIA
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I recently bought an HP iPaq 4150 for the specific purpose of reading ebooks. I got sick of having to shell out AU$20 for a new paperback every week (I buy a lot of books) only to have them fall apart a few weeks later (or for my friends to pinch them, savage them, or lose them).
.txt files. The first thing I tried to open was The Iliad (800k), and Word bombed out. You can of course dump it on a proper version of Word and export it to Reader format with the press of a button, but if you're regularly reading large .doc files, then that might be a problem.
The first thing I did was grab some Gutenburg books and have a read, then I bought Neuromancer from Amazon.com (after a lengthy technical battle - if your Temporary Internet Files in IE is full, you'll download your ebook only to have it not actually get installed. Repeat 4 times in confusion, then get told by Amazon that you've already downloaded it so you can't download it again. Punch monitor in frustration screaming about why this is so goddamn hard. Fortunately the Amazon guys believed my story and re-issued the book, cleared my Temporary Internet Files, downloaded again, and then it worked. But I digress).
The quality of the screen on the 4150 is great. I've only used Microsoft Reader to try and read books so far, and it works - that's about all you can say for a text reader, I guess.
I have a few minor complaints about Reader. First and foremost, there's quite a bit of whitespace around the edges of the page. This means that there isn't as much text on the page, increasing the number of pages per book - meaning you'll be turning pages pretty regularly. There's no option to shrink text (despite 10 years of staring at screens my eyes still surprisingly work ok) so you'll be doing quite a lot of page flipping to get through any decent amount of books.
There's no auto page-flipping function. I'm lazy, I'd like to just hold the thing and have it turn pages for me. One of the main reasons I got it was so I could just lie in bed reading at night and try to relax so I can get to sleep; if it was flipping pages for me that'd be handy!
A non-Reader complaint that I feel is a little relevant is that Pocket Word can't open large
I haven't tried Adobe Acrobat yet (in fact I don't even know if there's a version for this device) so can't comment on that.
My only other comment is that I've been a bit disappointed with the range of available ebooks - I was hoping it would make my book-buying easier to get a lot of titles that my local bookstores don't stock (.. and have a 3-4 week order time from the US), but sadly quite a number of publishers don't make ebook versions available yet.
I've read on all sorts of devices, and the best so far has been my Apple Newton. You can pick one up for cheap with a rechargable battery. It works OK with OSX. It reads all sorts of files. The backlit screen is pleasant to read on and the interface is... well it's Apple. But the really brilliant thing is the form factor - it's just large enough to make holding it a dream. It's like a book and is very confortable in your hand. The screen size is large enough to get enough text on a screen to be useful.
However, I've since moved to an e310 because of the price and the features. It's still one of the least expensive in it's class and it works extremely well for reading. I take novels with me everywhere I go now.
I have a Palm Tungsten E $200 which is a great e-book reader and cheap.
PHB sends Dilbert to talk to the marketing people.
... Ha ha! And it must be capable of time travel! And have a telepathic interface!"
Dilbert: "Dave, tell me how marketing thinks the product should be"
Dave: "It must have a 45" screen and fit a 007 suitcase. It needs to function as a phone and an air conditioner too"
Dilbert: "Hmm"
Dave: "It must cure fatal diseases and brush our teeth while we sleep!
Dilbert slaps Dave.
Dilbert: "I can write a program that will show some fish in the computer screen"
Dave: "Yeah, a lot of people want that"
I bought a Visor Deluxe primarily as an ebook reader in early 2001. It did the job quite well.
About a month ago, I replaced it with a Palm Tungsten E, and it is just amazing for ebooks. The colour 320x320 screen gives very crisp easy to read text in any lighting conditions. The Tungsten also has 32 meg to store books, the 8 meg on the Visor was too limiting.
The only drawback is that the Tungsten has a built in battery that's only good for 1-2 days, so if it runs out of power of I forget to charge it, I can't use it until I get back to the computer to recharge it. The visor takes AAA's and I have a few sets of NiMH one that last about 2 weeks. By carrying a spare set, I never ran out of power, and I always had 1 set in the charger.
I read about 2 novels/week on these PDAs. Jason
ProfQuotes
If you do not mind small mem, and monochrome, the ipaq 3100 (monochrome series would be a good bet) .. ..
....
...
:)
you save battery time on the mono display, you can put linux on it if you wish
I would put a mem+battery upgrade on that
I wish there was a rugged monchrome (greysale) pda with long battery time, and on the fly cpu scaling for battery time, and a bit slimmer thatn my current 3870 BRICK
ahm did i forget a jog-dial (like on the clie) for easy one hand operation ? I really have to throw up when I see mr manager getting the PDA out of the pocket, dropping everythin, because using a pda is still a 2 hand operation !
ahm on my IPAQ there is the screen protector, that makes the mess more messy
maybe a press-a-button-fold-out double screen pda like my DonkeyKong game from nintendo (cca 20 years ago)?
Sharp SL-5500 Zaurus. Sure, its only a 320x240 screen, but its cheaper than almost every other PDA out there.
I always thought I couldn't stand to read ebooks, and never gave them much thought, until I lost my job and needed another way to feed my book addiction. Surprisingly, I found that reading on my Zaurus was an absolute joy.
I've been reading my way through the Baen Free Library CDs on it. I use Plucker to pluck the frameless version of the books I want to read. Before that I, wrote a perl scrip to rtf2txt it, then split the file on criteria I specified. I read these files on the magnificent OpieReader, which is as full featured as you could possibly want.
I've found that I use three light settings. In the dark, or minimal light, I used the lowest light setting. The Zaurus has a continuous life of about five or six hours this way. In the mornings, in bed, reading my plucked streams before facing the world, I have to crank the light to max. Of course, I'm next to an outlet the entire time there. You'll get about an hour untethered time this way. Finally in pretty much any other lighting condition, I can just turn the light completely off. You'll want to embolden the text if you do this, mind you. You'll be able to read for days on end this way.
One might expect that 320x240 might strain the eyes during long reading, but I have found that it doesn't bother me at all. If its problematic for you, you can always crank the font size up with the touch of a button.
404 Error:
Once you have your device, check out the Baen ebooks. I buy these. They are all science fiction and fantasy.
Here are some free ones to get you started:
http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm
And you can buy more here:
http://www.webscription.net/
No DRM. Just ebooks. They are trusting you not to be a pirate, and charging a fair price, and for that I reward them by buying stuff and recommending them.
Let me say that again. No DRM! No serial numbers, no registration, no limit on the number of cards you can copy it to. No DRM.
Even the ones they want you to pay for have a few chapters online for free. This is to give you a taste of the book, hook you in and make you want to finish reading it. If the book is a collection of stories, often one or more complete stories will be available for free reading.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Palm OS will do most of what you're asking for. There isn't much in the way of antialiasing, but palm PDAs do have really high resolution nowadays.
.DOCs, though Documents to Go can do that too). Acrobat Reader available, etc etc. No Microsoft reader, for obvious reasons.
If you're looking for bargain bin, I would say Tungsten E would cut it. SD card expansion for fitting more books, MP3s, and even Oggs. Doubles as a great PDA on its own, and $149-199 to boot.
The tungsten T3 is even better, but right now it's a bit pricey. Its main advantage over the E is that it uses a virtual graffiti area, so you can use the entire screen length when extended to read books. Also has a landscape mode in apps that support it. It's pretty expensive right now, but that should start falling once Palmone introduces its new spring models.
Both models are rechargeable, syncs up with Linux and OS X without much difficulty (I'm told, never done it myself).
PalmReader reads its own formats in addition to DOCs (not
Okay, the contrast on that screen left something to be desired. The color screen on the Clie eats batteries, but black text on a white background is kinder to my eyes.
There's a freeware hack called "ThinFont" that makes the rather weak font on the stock Clie heavier and easier to read; no stability issues that I've encountered. Just have a charger at home and office and you'll make it through a 90-minute commute... barely.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
I've read a few dozen ebooks (novels mainly) on my Sony CLIE NX70 palm pilot
While the screen isn't as good as some mentioned in sibling threads it certainly is good enough - and would get no complaints from me.
But to me the thing that REALLY makes the difference is the thumbwheel. It makes it very convenient to hold the Clie and scroll through the books page by page. And you dont have to switch your grips to scroll back to reread anything, you just use the thumbwheel.
I have trouble with passwords among other things.
The Franklin ebookman is a pda designed to read books on, its got a jog-wheel, touch screen, large screen, backlight. I've got one, and I use it constantly. It supports all the modern formats, and handles text files nicely.
search ebay, you can pick up one new with warrenty for under 50 USD last I checked.
Don't get a secondhand one, becuase if its got a fault (looses memory after you change batteries, requiring re-sync) you'll want to send it back under warrenty (franklin provide a *new* unit to replace faulty ones).
A little overkill never hurt anybody.
Doesn't anyone remember this? The e-ink devices look like they will be much better for reading text than a traditional LCD on a PDA or e-book reader. Unfortunately it seems they're only available in Japan right now... amazon.co.jp lists the Sony one... I'm sure you could get it shipped to the US, but at ~$422 it's not exactly cheap, not to mention who knows if any of the interface/software is in English.. Plus, since it's Sony it's doubtful that it will work with anything but Sony PCs.
Basically, this doesn't help you at all (sorry), but I would personally wait for e-ink devices to show up here.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
How about that new e-book reader from sony?
Sony Libre
I bought a Palm Tungsten W and regretted it pretty much right away - it sucks as a phone, and AT&T Wireless sucks even more. But it works great as a PDA and it redeemed itself completely when I discovered I could download etexts from usenet and read them anywhere. I installed Palm Reader and Docs to Go and now I carry my W where ever I go. I'm having fun rereading old scifi I read years ago, and stuff like that. It's amazing all the stuff you can find to dump on there. I love reading books with the Palm, and the Tungsten's high resolution and backlight make it very easy to read under almost any conditions. When I replace my W with something newer and better, reading etexts will be a major consideration. I also love that I can carry large amounts of reference material with me at all times.
It has the greatest display ever. Crystal clear!
I switched to a Sony Clie primarily for eBooks. Reasons are simply:
- Awesome, large format screen, especially when using a Palm reader pro
- Fantastic battery life - I was reading and listening to OGG music on a 12 hour plus trip, and did not run out. Without music play, it seems to go forever.
- Works well with OS X (using 3rd party software)
Of course, there are other nice features such as WiFi, camera, and the usual features for a Palm PDA.
I have used Newtons, other Palms, and PocketPCs. The Toshiba e740 was not bad, but the battery life is poor even with the big batteries.
Of course, this fun does not come cheaply...
-- Harald
Harald Striepe
Its funny you posted this. I've just delved into this for the first time with the old Handspring Visor I've been toting around. I paid $100 for it when it was new, but I just picked one up at a yard sale for $15. (Both 8MB) I used the Weasel reader, so I don't have to pay anything for that. (Although it doesn't like my version of ZLib. Throws a warning message but continues all right.) I've been reading Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow and I got a copy of Free Cultre by Lessig. The Visor has a backlight that lets me read without waking up the Mrs. Its been a lot of fun for me because this is the first time I've really applied open source software. I've *read* about it all over the place, but this was the first time I ever really found a *personal* benefit. I've seen Tiger Direct advertising old Palms for $45. Doesn't seem to take much to get into the OSS EBook thing.
Turns out screen resolution and quality are not nearly as important as you would think. Most of the time you will be reading somewhere with decent light, including an airplane. A non-backlit screen has some big advantages -- namely it uses a lot less power, and that's pretty important.
And sure, more screen resolution is great, but it's not a killer, more to the point it's not worth making the thing bigger and heavier to get it. You want to be able to lightly hold it in your hand without burden. And you want the batteries to last a very long time.
Which probably means you don't want one of those PDAs that can run linux. Not that you couldn't have linux on a low-power PDA, but we tend to see it ported more to the higher-power units which don't last as long and need heavier batteries.
So re-sort your priorities:
a) Thin and light and easy to hold
b) Extra long battery life
c) Decent contrast screen when not lit. (Light as a backup)
d) More screen res
e) Nice software platform.
I have read many books on the Palm V. There are better units now, but this is just to say be careful about what you really want.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I've got a Zire 71 (cheap), I use Mobipocket and read it sideways. I keep a few books on an SD card so I've got something to read while waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Battery life is very good IMO. I read for about 3 hours today. Misc phone lookups, filled in todays calender for later billing. Played MP3s off that same SD card (while reading I might add). Probably on for about 3-4 hours straight today and I had 76% battery life left when I plugged it in at the end of the day. Sometimes I read all evening, in addition to such a day of use and rarely drop below 50% on the battery meter. All charged up by morning and ready for another round.
I have an older compaq ipaq and I find it very condusive to the task of reading ebooks. All I use is microsoft reader. For books I occasionally surf usenet and get some, but mostly I download guttenberg texts and use word on my windows computer and using a plugin I turn the texts into microsoft reader files. Reader loads fast and using the multidirection pad to turn pages is a big plus. Lastly I notice I read faster using the ipaq compared to normal books. If it wasn't for this ability to read books so easily on my ipaq I would have popped linux onto it a long time ago.
The best PDA for eBooks is definitely the Sharp Zaurus SL-A300. You can get them brand new in Tokyo for about $140. I imagine used ones must be quite cheap on eBay. This baby is lightweight, fits in your pocket, has a really nice display and great battery life. You can even connect a Compact Flash adaptor sleeve to it and use it for email, web, etc. Install OpieReader and JustReader and you have the majority of non-DRM'ed eBook formats covered. If you can read Japanese you can check it out here:
http://sharp-world.com/corporate/news/0206.html
The new PocketPC PDA's have VGA screens which means very good resolutions for screens of that size.
Picked mine up for $50.00 on clearance at office max. 18 hr battery life, has 8 mb onboard and 64 expansion card. I use baen.com to get most of my books. The orginal rocketbook use serial, but the REB1100 and higher have usb. They released the convertion tools a few months ago.
Darkace911
Well, Sony recently launched the LIBRIe reader. It has a sharp 800*600 screen that uses the relatively new electronic ink technology that is so battery efficient that it will last you through 10,000 pages of text because it only uses electricity when the screen changes. Click here for an article on it.
I've got an iPaq 5555 that I read ebooks on every day.
r s/downloa ds/rmr.asp
First of all, you need to use your brain a little to make it useful, not just bitch when you find it's not what you're used to.
I remapped the "record" button on the side to "page down", since the only thing I ever recorded was my ass sounds when I'd sit down on it. This way I hold it in one hand and click to advance the page. It's FAR FAR more readable than a paper book when you get used to it.
Also, and very important for you Project Guttenberg junkies, MS has a free plugin for Word to convert docs to the MS Reader format:
http://www.microsoft.com/reader/develope
Just download the raw text books, then convert them to reader format and you're flying.
Hate MS all you like, but I get a lot of useful stuff out of my Pocket PC.
I used to use many different PDAs, mostly non-color. Probably the best greyscale was the Handspring Visor Pro. I could read all of my e-mails that I sync'd but contrast was a problem. I used to try and sync some of the news sites that I liked to read before I went to class, but trying to read those was terrible in bad lighting. The first time I saw a color PDA I loved it. The next chance I get I will probably get one of the Tungsten's.
Whatever you get, make sure the reader program you use has some kind of autoscroll feature. Its way better than having to keep hitting a button to get to the next page.
If you get a Zaurus, check out OpieReader at http://www.timwentford.uklinux.net/
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I have been using PDAs for precisely this function for about 2 years now. I avoid eBooks like the plague because of DRM and other stupid old technology features (like pages). (For a good example of the limitations of eBooks read Chapter 10 of Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig). I also use PDAs to read news I gather from the Net. From my experience:
The webbrowsing and text viewing applications are fairly fast once they have been loaded into memory. NetFront (the webbrowser) supports CSS and properly renders PNGs. Web pages are generally pretty, although getting large fonts to work is a bit of a hassle. Both CF and SD/MMC cards are supported.
The screen on the Zaurus is unbelieably bright (especially if you have used an iPAQ before). The colors are breathtaking. The screen is really amazing. The resolution is also really 640x480 like on a desktop (for post C700 models).
The Zaurus battery is rechargable and replaceable like a cellphone battery. It lasts for hours even when playing mp3s.
PocketIE is very slow. It starts up quickly but loads pages slowly. It does not support CSS and renders PNGs improperly. It often crashes or locks. The screen cannot be scrolled while it is loading. For older web pages, it is not bad, though.
Text is loaded in PocketWord. This is, for lack of a better word, a beast. It is extremely slow, and you would not want to read with it. If you have a CF card expansion pack, forget reading text files. It cannot handle large text files (read: Gutenberg etext files) well or at all (I have not tried in a long time). If you have a CF card expansion pack, forget PocketWord: It will not work.
The screen is bright enough and the resolution is good enough for reading. The colors are nice enough. In addition, the iPAQ comes with a sort of sunscreen case, which makes it readable in extremely bright sunlight (that is a difficult feat even for paper books).
My iPAQ does not have a replacable battery, but most of the new models I have seen do. The battery life is very good. It should last many hours even when playing mp3s. There are expansion packs with extra batteries.
From what I have been told (by vendors), the Palm does not have a webbrowser. I know there are specialty programs, like Plucker, for converting web pages to PalmOS compatible formats, but I think this is terribly old fashioned of the Palm people to leave this feature out.
The displays on Palms I have looked at in stores have not impressed me. There could be a model with an unbelievable display, but I have not seen it.
I cannot comment on anything related to batteries because I have not used a Palm.
For the first two reasons, I never waisted my money on a Palm. It seems they are trapped in a time warp of what "PDA owners" of 1996 wanted or something. They do not seem to be concerned with putting a computer in your pocket. For people who use PDAs for their PDA functions, however, I have heard that Palm is the best.
Finally, I have not used actual eBook or PDF software on any of the three. I think HTML is the way to go anyway. I just want some pretty text. I do not want pages or DRM or other restrictions. I also like to be able to scroll text. I also want images, but I do not want them locked into the document where I cannot view them separately (many webbrowsers, PocketIE in particular, shrink images to an unreadable size, but image display programs will still display them properly).
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
4) DRM
If Sony's Librie wasn't full of DRM it would be my choice.
Print them all out on paper, put them inside of decent folders. Complain that your student loan wasn't big enough to cover a laptop, or just say you "like being retro"...
Just because it's in electronic format doesn't mean it has to stay. Print them out in the library while your at it.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
Microsoft's Cloud9 blog had a question similar to this, and I answered pretty much what I'm saying here:
A PDA is great to read a short story, when on a bus or plane, or on the can, when there's limited time and space spend on reading.
I won't take a PDA to the beach, and in my house there are enough dead tree books that I don't think I'll ever need to read off my PDA.
But for reasonable-size fiction, such as Cory Doctorow's A Place So Foreign and 8 More, are great to haul around. Note the e-version only has 6 more, not eight. Two clever stories are left for the dead tree version.
Some years, the Hugo nominees get e-published free, and I'll snag those and have enough short reading for a coupl'a months.
What am I reading on? A Palm 505 using Palm Reader. Would other things be better? Sure, but probably not enough to get me to read novels, or have it be my primary reading source.
Design for Use, not Construction!
You can pretty much forget about finding decent Acrobat/PDF support for anything handheld. Ansyr has a PDF viewer for Pocket PC ($75), but from what I hear development pretty much ceased for it when Ansyr was acquired in Oct 2001. There are plenty of PDF-to-(whatever) converters out there, but you might as well abandon any hope of directly viewing PDF on anything smaller than a laptop.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Any Zaurus from the following: SL-C700, SL-C750, SL-C760, SL-C860, SL-6000
Beside that marvellous-looking new Sony thing with ePaper screen, there's really no contest.
Opie-reader reads AportisDoc, Weasel (ztxt), Plucker, gzipped text, ppms text. It will also give html a go, but the built-in NetFront browser works well, and Opera is available for it.
The 640x480 screen on the Zaurus means the auto-scroll is super-smooth, and makes other PDAs look like they have lego screens. The screen is incredible quality. It really is like nothing else. Super-clear and bright; it has to be seen to be believed.
The clam-shell design has got a thumb wheel that can be assigned to scroll-speed (or whatever) when in portrait mode.The PDF readers read full PDFs, none of this Palm cut-down stuff.
It runs Linux on-board, has got USB, has a removable rechargable battery (rechargable in-place via the AC adaptor).
As to "pay very much", well if you buy an import, you'll pay a fair whack. If you get one direct from (in?) Japan you can get it much cheaper. I got my C750 for 60000 yen about two weeks after it was released in Japan. It's a lot cheaper over there now.
My Zaurus has seriously changed the way (and the amount) that I read. So much so, that dead tree books are starting to really annoy me because they take up so much physical space.
It's definitely one of the best things I have ever bought
...is the default resolution of a Pocket PC (QVGA), not 200x320.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Admittedly it's designed for playing games, but it's actually perfect for eBook reading - comfortable to grip for a long time, big landscape-oriented screen which is better than portrait for document reading (other devices can do landscape but very few of them are designed to be held in that orientation for a long time), dual SD card slots so you can store a large library on the cheap, long battery life... And if you feel like taking a break you can always whip out a free SNES/NES/GB/GBC/Genesis/TG16/MAME emulator :-) Some Linux-based PDA's do have widescreens, but unfortunately they don't have the DRM format support of Palm and PPC and if you really want to do some serious eBook reading that's pretty much essential.
Cheaper, no batteries, much higher resolution
The ipaq 4150 is good, and cheap atm, as long as you can put up with the fact its still a windows OS, and that the screen can have a yellow hue.
Display is 640x240, which is enough, and you can install any fonts you like. It's only greyscale, but as you say, that's fine for reading text. It does have a nice backlight, though, which is great for reading in bed!
It takes AAs instead of having an inbuilt rechargeable, but that's how I prefer it -- if you want to use rechargeables, you can use any form of AA rechargeable you like. You can use a standard power adapter too. And if you're away from wall sockets for any length of time, you can take spare AAs, or even buy them. I've had enough bad experiences with proprietary batteries running out away from home, that I value that! I generally get 10-20 hours' use, but then I'm a power user, and just reading books should give much more.
It also doesn't have USB, but that's not really a problem for me. My Mac has a CompactFlash reader, so I pop the CF out of the 5mx and into the reader, and it mounts as a drive on the desktop. Great for backups and file transfers. As to capacity, it has 16MB of built-in memory, but you can get CFs over 1GB now, and if you can fill that with text I'd like to see it.
And since the same few objections get posted every time someone mentions ebooks:
- No, no-one's claiming ebooks will replace paper completely.
- No, we don't care that you don't like them.
- Yes, we still like them anyway.
Of course paper has some advantages, but ebooks have others, and they'll balance differently for different people. For me, I find the convenience of always having reading material in my pocket means I do most of my reading on the 5mx.Oh, and while I'm here, a quick unsolicited plug for Fictionwise as a good place to get texts. It's a shame that most of their latest stuff is DRMed, but they have a lot of good unrestricted stuff too.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
And while you are enjoying that PG e-text why not stop on over at Distributed Proofreaders and help proof some of these e-texts so we can get more into PG. Help is always welcome and we only ask for "a page a day"!
http://www.pgdp.net
USFJoseph
The Zaurus with the QTReader (or Opie-Reader)
p =5 9
http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?ap
and a big SDCard and you can read ebooks to your hearts content.
Don't forget to visit alt.binaries.e-book for your reading needs.
Play Well
I have already read 12 books on it, honestly if its a good title (or dirt cheap) I buy the book, but for my normal everyday bookreading, I use my visor.
With my cellphone taking over for my PDA, my visor has taken on a new life as a ebook reader/notepad for class.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I've been doing just this for almost the last two years with my sony T665C. I paid $300 for it, but you could find one on ebay for $50-100 and it has a great screen, decent battery life, USB connectivity, and even plays mp3's. This way you can get more for your money. No need for overkill, a new PDA means wasted money if all you need is to read ebooks.
I have a Sony Clié 320x320 color. It is terrible for reading e-Text on. I've read over 30 books on an old Handspring Visor Edge and it's much better. 160x160 is kind of too bad, but black and white displays are much easier to read than a bright backlight display. (turn off the backlight on a Clié and it's totally unreadable except in direct sunlight).
Old monochrome/grayscale LCDs just seem a lot easier on the eyes. It's too bad that you can't view photos on b&w but it really is the best for grayscale.
Also all of the ARM-based Clié devices have notoriously short battery life (barely better than WinCE devices!). I'd go through 2 entire novels without charging on a Visor Edge. Good luck doing that with a Clié which has a battery life less than 4 hours of run time.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Linux connectivity and expandability is not a highlight of any WindowsCE based PDA but the 4150 is very nice. I whole-heartedly recommend that you NEVER NEVER NEVER start the eReader program and immediately install uBook Reader. This thing tackles most plain-text formats, including HTML. It takes a bit of time to find a skin (I recommend Vanilla) that you like but once you're set you'll never look to another reader. http://www.gowerpoint.com/
I've been reading 'Shogun' on my Jornada cover to cover (if you can say that in this case), and it was okay, while not perfect. The perfect reading devices these days nevertheless are of course tablet PCs, although the slashdot crowd does not seem to subscribe to that. If you get a slate like the Fujitsu Stylistic or a Motion, then they are portable and lightweight enough, they got real screens from 10 inches onward, do in fact run all the reading apps you might ever need, sport reasonably sized hard discs and will, if you so desire, run linux with only minimal discomfort. Original poster of article didn't name price limits, but if that's a problem, try to get a good deal on a refurb or via eBay, obviously. Worked for me, works great, I hardly ever need to leave my machine alone now, reclining chair, terace, uni, bed (yes indeed), bathtub. Better strike out the bathtub, though...
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
People who are recommending the Zaurus and other expensive PDAs are missing the point...if I read the original post correctly, the poster was looking for something fairly minimalist and cheap.
.LIT (and I've never found anything in .LIT that I wanted to read on my PDA that I couldn't either get some other way) and .PDF (well, technically you can get a PDF reader for Palm, but I think the conduit requires Windows and anyway, a PDF is in no real sense an "ebook"; it's a dehydrated paper book). With a 64-meg or 128-meg Memory Stick, you can store a whole library in your pocket. And the 415 has a high-res monochrome LCD display that displays books very well and is easy on the battery life--and a rechargeable battery, too. And the brushed-metal aluminum case seems to me to be a lot sturdier than the plastic cases of other PDAs. Finally, as far as Linux and OS X compatibility are concerned, it works like a charm with jpilot.
I have an old Clie T415 that I bought toward the end of the 415's useful life. I've never had cause to regret it.
The variety of software available for the Palm PDA platform can read ebooks in just about any format commercially available today save for
Plus, you should be able to get it really cheap on eBay about now.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Right now nothing electronic comes close to the convenience and readability of a paperback book.
Wait for E-Paper, it will have an order of magnitude better resolution than anything available today, and the contrast will be like paper.
Until then... buy paperbacks in used bookstores.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Skip the Zaurus, you won't be able to get readers for the locked formats. I presume the many other flaws I found with my Zaurus have been smoothed over since then, but it just doesn't matter if you can't get a decent reader.
You're pretty much left with PocketPC and Palm devices. I'm not a fan of the PPC devices because they have poor battery life and a difficult to use interface and cost more than anything else, but since you can get all of the maintream readers for them they may be worth a look. I can't say I like their screens that much but they're a lot better than a low-end Palm.
My personal choice, the one I've read dozens of books on, is a Clie PEG-NR70 (the flip-screen dragonball one). I don't believe this, or even its follow-on PEG-NX70 with the ARM chip, is still available but its big, sharp screen is the best I've seen on a palmtop. Sony has really done a knock-down job on screen quality.
If I were to buy one right now, and I'm thinking about it because my NR70 has been beat to death, I'd probably get PEG-TH55. It seems to have the same screen, or at least a similar one, but I like the form factor better than the NR70.
Palm's Tungsten T3 is very interesting, and I really like the way it collapses, but fails for me because there's no lid to keep you from smashing the screen -- you have to get one of those awful bulky armor cases.
As always YMMV, but as I said I've been exceptionally pleased with the Sony device. At $400 it's not cheap, but at least it's not a dedicated ebook :-).
About ebook readers: I haven't used Microsoft's reader at all so I have no comment about it. Adobe's palmtop ebook reader is total junk, the least usable most irritating ebook reader I've ever seen. It paginates strangely despite forcing you to spend a long time "formatting for your device" and has the worst DRM of any of them. Mobipocket is my favorite reader in terms of interface, but its DRM is mildly restrictive, allowing only 4 devices for any locked ebook. The PalmReader offers the best DRM flexibility (it's key is your credit card number; you probably don't want to give that away) and a clean, usable interface. When I am reading locked books I opt for Palm format whenever possible for DRM flexibility, but with unlocked books I prefer Mobipocket.
So far I've had excellent luck finding ebooks in Palm and Mobipocket formats. www.fictionwise.com has the greatest format flexibility of the ebook providers I've tried.
Enjoy,
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
omg asl plz kthx
vr3
It doensn't have usb connection, but I think it'll do for text reading and it operates on alkaline batteries.
I've been using my iPod to read eBooks. While it is very convenient, it does have a major flaw. After a certain number of lines, the iPod will stop displaying anymore text from that document. You need to divide the eBook into many different files, so that you won't miss anything. Confucius say, use soap.
Those poor bastards, they have us surrounded. Now we can fire at them in all directions!
While having a big screen would be nice, you'll find that there are mitigating factors to smaller screen sizes (ie, portability).
... 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)
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)
For price performance ratio the hp 1910 refurbished from hp is the hands down choose. Screen is great from darkness to daylight & adjustable so you don't burn your eyeballs with brightness (use low power setting) & color to boot. I use Mobipocket reader because you have full control over the text size, oriention & color (I like white text on black background). Don't know if it will meet all your system requirements. Bonus is that it can also be used as a damn good mp3 player. Can you say audiobooks.
Yes, I miss mine - I upgraded after it was smashed by a truck (still worked, only half the display was cracked and unreadable). I did find it annoying that it had less contrast than the lower-res Palms, but with the backlight it worked okay.
My suggestion: buy an inexpensive Pocket PC like the Dell Axim X3. Or you can get a refurbished iPAQ 1945 at BeachCamera.com for $200, shipped. The 1945 is a better fit in your hand than the Axim, IMO, and that's important for an e-book reader.
;)
Once you get the PPC, you'll find that you use it for much, much more than just an e-book reader, even if you're convinced that you have a device for every other task.
When you get to that point, visit us at pocketnow.com for news and reviews on Pocket PC hardware and software to make your PPC more useful....
You'll be glad you did.
I read Bram Stokers Dracula at work on my Dell Axim.
The Axim was only $175 brand new. It came with an EBook reader and some free EBooks. It also has a SD slot plus a CF slot so you can add over 1GB of storage. (That's a lot of books).
Here is a link to the Dell Axim X5 This is the more powerful version that will play video as well.
Here is where I downloaded Dracula from
http://www.kubuntu.org/
You could get a Palm Zire (I use Zire 71) + SD/MMC card.
I sync my regular plucker reading directly onto my palm.
For large books/PDF's (using acrobat's free palm PDF reader) I transfer them onto my SD card with a USB card reader. The card reader also allows me to use the SD card as a regular old flash drive.
Plucker is especially nice as it allows for custom fonts (with antialiasing). And the 320x320 resolution of the Zire definately helps.
~200$ for Zire 71 + ~50 for 256MB SD card = 250 for a multipurpose device (low-res camera, mp3 player, ebook reader, games and ofcourse an organizer!)
I was also looking for something to read books on. Plus I figured it'd be nice to have Linux on the PDA.. and I ended up with a Z-6000.
In a word: awesome. The screen is beautiful. Bright and beautiful. You can hit a button, and it flips into landscape mode.. making pleasant reading for hours upon hours. You can scrape webpages and read them in the Zaurus's full featured browser.. download PDFs and read them with a great PDF reader, or download ebooks and read them with any of the great readers.
Plus, this thing is literally bulletproof. Just throw it in a bag and go.. no worry about it breaking.
There's also a great community. When I first got this, I was asking tons of retarded questions.. and they were more than helpful in their responses.
The ONLY downside is that it's kind of pricy. But I'll use this thing forever..
-Fatty
I did see 139.99 atX 60+r efurb&btnG=Search+Frooglen x60. cfm
t em&cate gory=38331&item=3094217415&rd=1
http://www.google.com/froogle?tiled=1&q=PEG-N
but it was 522.02 at
http://superstore-electronics.com/pd_sony_peg
There is one for $78 right now with 50 min left:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI
TTYL
http://memoware.com/
Tons of excellent free e-books, and quite a few bad ones too.
The ______ Agenda
It was perfect for actually reading things.. the screen was just the right size.
But Mr. Jobs is a short sighted egomaniac and cancelled it right when the public was ready for it... so you would have to find a used one.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
my palm m125. Not color, and the res is probably lower than you want, but it suits my needs perfectly. I just pop in some good rechargeable batterries, and it lasts for about a week when reading every day. Btw, weasel reader can't be beat for ebook reading software on the palm, and you can convert pretty much any format into it's format.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
How is that a troll? I'm merely trying to get people to queue up to touch my cock in celebration of my FP. Geez.
i think your best bet is to get an old zire 71. they just becamse obsolete last week with the release of the zire 72($300), and have dropped in price to 100-150$. 320x240 color screen, rechargeable battery, pretty sure it fits all your requirements, plus it has a built in camera and can play mp3s and movies. i have one, and it works very well. the one tyhing i dont know about is hooking it up to linux/mac. ive seen people on the palm forums who have linux pcs, but i have no idea how they do it or ifd there is mac compatability.
Not sure if anyone here has plugged the Newton yet, but it's a wonderful machine for reading etexts. Large screen, nice contrast, and a good backlight. Plus you can get the newest model for around $100 if you shop around.
http://www.newtontalk.net
http://www.unna.org
A. Coward
even though it looks like you want a pda, i have to add this for your consideration--while it's a little bigger form factor than a pda, it is very portable (more so than a regular laptop)--also, it's got your other issues covered--battery life, OS, and, it won't kill your eyes like those lo-rez pda screens...;>
There is no eBook that anyone would want to use in lieu of a real, dead-tree version. Nothing is large enough, has the right resolution, battery-life, and most things out there that are large enough are not just specifically for eBooks.
You might want to keep and eye on that new electronic ink technology like this one mentioned on slashdot a little while back, though. I can guarantee you it won't be cheap for a little while after they release the technology, plus, it probably won't work with Linux unless you do some hacking, but keep an eye on it none the less..
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
... do any of thes PDAs have a feature to "flip a page" rather than scroll up and down only? Like mash the arrow key to the right or something, and the whole "page" whooshes over like a real page in a book?
The old palm will run lots of hours on a battery and about 16 with the backlite in darkness. NiCad AAA batteries are practical but don't last as long as alkalines.
.prc files from text or html files so the free CspotRun reader can read them. Only real drawback is that the backlight works in almost total darkness while the reflective display works only with reasonable light. In between the two conditions you are plain and simple out of luck. Light weight, low cost, long battery life, legible screen, lots of them on ebay and on clearance.
A handy free windows program produces
I have used it as a reader for several years now at home, on planes, while waiting various places, and while passing rainy times in a tent in the wilderness. Thoroughly functional, cheap, and a good stopgap until somebody makes a good ebook reader for a reasonable price.
I downloaded a bunch of books and converted them into the MS Reader format with a little MS Word plug-in that I got for free from Microsoft.
You will get similar results from any Pocket PC device.
Try the Microsoft web site. They have a free MS Word plug-in that converts text / whatever into MS Reader files. Most books I find around the Internet are a text format, and easily converted into MS Reader.
I can't comment on which is the best eBook reader because I've only ever used one.
I'm talking about a Palm, of course. It has a backlit screen, great battery life, fits into the palm of one hand, plenty of reader software, good integration with Linux, enough space for dozens of books, and it's cheap! You can get a second hand Palm Vx for $30. That means it's so cheap that you don't care if you lose/break it. So you can take it anywhere. Leave it in your pocket. Take it when you go travelling.
There might be better eBook readers out there but I'm happy with the Palm Vx.
Quite a few of the books I read are avalible in PDF form, and I'd like to read those while abroad as well- are there any good PDF reading devices with many of the same stats as above?
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
I've had a Sony Clie NX60 since early 2003, and absolutely love reading e-books on it. Here are some of the reasons I bought it specifically with reading in mind:
:-)
* extra-long 320 x 480 screen
* metal shell instead of plastic = hard to break
* vertical clamshell design protects screen
* CF slot (wifi or mem card) *and* memstick slot
* very clear 16-bit (64k) color screen
* LONG battery life (6+ hours for text on full brightness)
* will fully recharge in ~1 hour
* integrated keyboard (good for quick searching)
* jog dial (scrolling, click for a "page-down")
* can use in clamshell or "tablet" mode
I use iSilo to read most of the time; the newer versions allow for high-quality full-color illustrations within the text, full text formatting, and read off the memory stick. I've used it for up to 6 hours in a row on cross-country flights and read 900-page novels on it without any sense of eyestrain or need to recharge. If I manage somehow to run out of stuff to read, I just go online with it (its 802.11b works great, even at tMobile Hotspots) and grab something new off the web or have my laptop set up to send another book the next time I do a wireless hotsync.
As a major bibliophile, clutz (it has now survived being dropped on concrete and having hot tea spilled on it!) and geek, I highly recommend the NX 60. Best part now is, it's been out for over a year, so they're *cheap* if you buy online.
I've been using a Palm IIIc and a Palm IIIxe interchangeably for the past few years to read e-books, downloaded news articles, write short stories, notes, etc.
I use the Palm IIIxe when I know I'll be reading outdoors where there's a lot of sunlight. For indoor use, I stick with my Palm IIIc.
Haven't really felt a strong urge to upgrade, otherwise. Don't need a digital camera, MP3 player, hibachi bbq, toe massage, whatever. I just need the ability to read plain ol' ASCII text and somewhere to store numbers and addresses.
-- anthony
Palm makes an aluminum case for the Tungeten T series that I think is far superior to the leather cases.
It doesn't have any snazzy features like room for a notepad, but it does have storage for two SD cards, and you can expand the Palm without having to take it out of the case. And it's a whole lot stronger than anything else.
Only problem is, it would absolutely suck to use if you're a leftie.
It's appealing to have an entire library in your pocket but because you have it does it mean you're going to read all of it? Of course not. Much the same way having a 40gb iPod is great for bragging rights but that much music is entirely impractical for any human being to consume on their own. I think carrying around libraries encourages unfocused behaviour and deprives us of any sort of intimacy with cultural works like literature and music.
I believe that a lot of our electronic devices miss a lot of the basic things that books, paper, libraries, pens and record collections have provided for a long time. And best of all they're a heck of a lot cheaper.
_nfotxn
Buy the previous generation. I got a Clie SJ20 for $99. It's Black and white but at 320x320 it's pretty readable.
I have read dozens of books with my Palm 505. The backlight is VERY important. I have a palm V that worked ok but you needed good lighting. I like the ability to use SD cards I have one card with 30 or so books waiting to be read. Gives me a choice on my next read that way. iSilo has a has a windows based program that creates files for its reader than compresses up to 20 percent better that standard doc files. More books!!!
The advantage of a PDA is its small and convenient size - smaller than a paperback. You're reading mostly linearly anyway, so you don't need a large screen (paperbacks are much smaller than iBooks). All you need is crisp text, a backlight, decent battery life and an easy way to turn pages (I prefer a thumbwheel myself).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I have an iPaq 1940 since I wanted the smallest possible form factor, but still have a bright screen, and some form of wireless (bluetooth) without all the useless stuff. I will *not* be listening to MP3's, mapping via GPS, recording extended voice notes, lighting a small room, etc. with this device (though I probably could do all the above)
:)
o ads/rmr.asp) installed, and then convert to ebook. Yes, I know, req's MS Windoze and Word, but has been the simplest solution I have found for taking any document and making it instantly readable on a PocketPC.
However, what I have done is read about 15+ full novels (both Gutenberg, as well as various Stephenson, Orson Scott Card, Doctorow, Niven, Orwell, etc) I find the display large enough, and in fact I think I read faster on the screen since the smaller than a page viewing area allows me to scan faster. Not only that, but I could read whenever possible, on the bus, in a line, walking down the street. No more wasted moments.
I also use this on a Mac running 10.3 using PocketMac Pro and sync wireless via bluetooth. It's been flawless so far. I can drop plain text documents on there, or pre-formatted lit files and even pdfs (though I find the latter too large in size compared to the former). The *best* solution I have found is to take whatever document you want (Gutenberg text, webpage), drop it into MS Word on a Windoze box with the free Reader extension (http://www.microsoft.com/reader/developers/downl
Lastly, while reading on my iPaq I can make bookmarks, highlight passages and have these show up in the MS reader on a computer or peruse through on my iPaq for favored sections.
My favorite source is Blackmask. It pretty much as evertyhing in Gutenberg but in every format imaginable. Most books come in Ms-Reader, Acrobat, Rocket eBook, Zipped format, iSilo, Mobipocket and EasyRead.
That way you pick your favorite format and read ebooks on your PDA.
"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age." -Robert Frost
I have a 4150 as well and I love it. But more on topic I'd like to suggest the ipaq 1910. They go for about $150-160 on Ebay.
Same size as the 4150, similar features, but no Wifi. If most of your work with a PDA is gonna be reading books I don't know why you would spend $400 on the big brother.
Yes, Acrobat is avail for the Pocket PC. I've never used it.
However, I do use MS Reader daily to read books and I think it kicks much a$$. Beats the hell out of my old Palm M100 and Palmreader or Plucker. Perhaps a newer color Palm model would work as well, don't know.
It's my PDA,
it's my phone,
it runs all my old palm shit.
iSync it with PDF reader.
I read Free Culture on it.
Got Chonsky up next.
I have a Zodiac. When I'm not playing Stuntcar Extreme, I use it to read e-books, sometimes while playing MP3s in the background. Now if only AvantGo would support landscape screens!!!!
If you have a text file and Mac OS X, there is software than can use those voices (Fred, et. al.) to synthisize speech from plain text (PG). It comes out as AIFF, which can be converted to AAC or MP3. Then, this can be played on any digital audio player with enough capacity. One d isadvantage is that the voices are so monotonous that its impossible to actually enjoy a book. That's why its only useful for "reading" books for an English class, for example.
I use the PalmReader software on my Sony Clie to read palm e-books with. Adobe even has a version for palm finally although it works quite clunky on a palmOS device. They should have totally revamped how it works for PDA's as it stands now it works just like it does on a PC which equals slow and well, clunky is the best way I can describe it. The only thing I don't like about ebooks is the licence to them. Unlike a regular book its yours for life, no selling it at a garage sale or giving it away etc... this is why the prices for them I believe MUST be kept well below the real "book" equivalent. (and the same goes with all pay e-solutions, digital music etc...) As far as other text things like Project Gutenberg /non e-book types Plucker is a pain in the rear to install and use so you're right that's no solution. The best thing I can think of is actually taking the document in question from the web and convert it into palm-reader format on your pc first. (here's another thing that lends to M$ monopoly here, they offer conversion to MS Reader format free, in fact its just a plug in to Word whereas for PalmOS devices not only do you have to pay for the PalmReader software (the pro version anyway which you need if you do a lot of ebook reading) but also have to pay for the convertor program. Oh and if you want to read the ebooks on your pc as well its a seperate fee for the PalmReader on your PC as well.
No wonder PalmOS devices have lost a lot of market share (50% I read a couple days ago) to windows ones.
I'm surprised I don't see any mention of one of the greatest book reading platforms I've run across the Toshiba e8xx series.
Cons: price @500-600 bucks depending on how hard you shop. Costs more money for syncing with mac os "Missing Sync". Hard to find a comfortable protective case ala iPaq 3xxx series.
Pros: Great 480x640 screen @ 4 inches. Thumb dial that allows quick page flipping and is very ergonomic in its placement. 128MB internal RAM holds about200 books comfortably while leaving plenty of ram free for other apps.
I finally broke down and bought one after eyeing them from afar for a while. I used an iPaq 3835 for about 3 years before making the purchase due mainly to the added screen real estate for reading and the built in wi-fi and compaq flash card slot. I have problems reading books due to contrast issues with the text and paper. I have found however, that reading on the e805 is easier for me because of the adjustable backlight and true white provided by the screen.
I use a Palm m505 with internal 16 megs and an extra of 32 megs on MMC card. The display is color, backlighted and the resolution is good. The internal battery goes for seven hours or more with the light on. These Palms were discontinued and are quite cheap second-hand, look on e-bay.
I'm very pleased by the Weasel Reader. It has a nice autoscroll function and the text orientation can be changed. A very nice piece of free software!
The best ever was the Handera 330, with the LiOn battery. 320x240 display, ran forever with the backlight on given the LiOn battery. It's been discontinued, of course.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does it have a headphone out? Can it do wireless?
Can it run on AC power?
Thanks,
ft
Get any of the sony clie series with the full 320x480 screen. this is what I do with mine most. For an ubergeek, the th-55 has a nice screen, a killer battery life (10+ hours when just reading, 6-8 with wireless) and wifi (can you say SSH client?) use palm reader pro. can't use microsoft reader on palm os, but what did you expect?
Such a device must have the following features. .
I've met dozens of people who would love to have a portable word processor/reader of this sort. I'm one of them.
The fact that nobody has made one is the result of either all the manufacturers are retards, or that the market for a useful tool is too small; that the bulk of consumers are retards. Take your pick. Either way, if and when such a device does come along, I'm sure it will cost way more than it's worth. The technology for such a device has been around for ages now, but all we have are a bunch of pretend Tri-Corders that play MP3's but which cannot scan for shit.
PDA's annoy the piss out of me. Glorified day planners and music boxes, --and I've always thought that their earlier cousins, the humble Walkman, while cool in a gadget kind of way, was far too awkward, distracting and downright irritating to actually use in the real world.
Just a reader, please. Bells and Whistles are strictly for Clowns.
-FL
I've been meaning to write a review of Weasel Reader for a while now so I just did. The original work in progress is at Weasel Reader review.
While there are many formats for eBooks and a few dedicated pieces of hardware on the market I've found that after trying out everything I could find I've settled on just a few choice technologies that I have gotten the most actual reading out of. In fact just one aspect of one piece of software in particular pretty much wraps it up for me: Autoscroll Mode: Screen Wrap as found in Weasel Reader. Every other text reader autoscroll I have come across forces the eyes to contantly move, often very unsmooth, much unlike a book with its clear sharp letters that stay firmly in place. I believe this common misfeature leads to far greater eye strain and a lower overall acceptance of eBooks because of it. The only possibly superior scroll mode I would like to see added would be a flash mode where words or phrases are flashed sequentially onto the same spot allowing you to read without moving your eyes at all, then you just have to remember to blink on the periods!
Weasel Reader will run on most any PalmOS device which gives you not only a wide range of PDA hardware to choose from but also desktop emulators should you really fall in love with the Weasel! Having a good selection allows you to choose a device that fits well in your hand, has an easy to read high contrast screen, and enough capacity to store a selection of books. I'm currently using a Handspring Visor Prism and keep a few dozen books on hand to read at night after the wife goes to bed with the lights out or in the queue at the grocers or any other place those nasty slowdowns in our fast paced moderns lives creep up.
All that said Weasel Reader can be a bit overwhelming to configure so I offer the following as suggestions to get the most out of this great piece of software:
* Options, Preferences:
** Check Skip Project Gutenberg license
** Show zTXT size in index
** Always remember position.
** Use Scroll/Bookmark Buttons
* Options, Display Preferences:
** Line Spacing -2
* Options, Scroll Preferences:
** Autoscroll Mode Screen Wrap
Once the above are set open up a book and you will see a status bar that has a return to menu arrow, percentage of the book complete, the time, battery indicator, and access to the bookmarks menu. Frankly, I don't care about any of that and as long as "Always remember position" is checked as listed above that is the only bookmark I need. Thankfully a simple tap anywhere on the left hand letter side of the silkscreen hides this menu leaving our screen chock full of text and only a slim progress bar at the bottom to give us an idea how far we are along in our read.
Now for the fun bit: Press the Address Book button and a dotted line begins decending the screen, a virtual page flip in progess pacing your reading. Too fast you say? Tap the down arrow a few times. Want it faster? Just tap up until you are zipping along. I find myself automatically adjusting the speed as I read and punching the Address Book button when I take a break to rest my eyes. Once out of the auto scroll mode the up and down buttons move up and down a page at a time but I find myself tapping the top or bottom half of the screen with my fingernail quite naturally.
Overall Weasel Reader is an excellent piece of software I've gotten many hours of enjoyment from. Enjoy!
I have two wonderful recommendations for you
First, the M100, which can be had on ebay for incredibly cheap. This is crappy little PDA that does just about everything you need. no this isn't a contradiciton.
It's slow, clunky, and has a low res screen. That screen is only good for showing text, and maybe a calendar.
This is where the catch comes in. That's all you need. The res is perfectly comfortable for reading books (I've read over 15 books on the M100) and the indiglo backlight is unoffensive to the eyes. You can also read the the LCD in bright sunlight, and two AAA batteries last about 3 months due to the low res LCD and lack of an "all-the-time" backlight
Second - the tungsten E. If you NEED new features like high-res (the icons do look prettier, but that's about it,) the ability to run ScummVM, and want to play MP3's, this little $200 workhorse is amazing. The USB interface and SD card make it great for carrying virually the whole gutenberg library with you. The tungsten E is hard to see in bright sunling, however, and the built in recharable battery runs out in a day or two of normal use.
If you're reading books, don't pay more that $200 for this, and get your hands on plucker.
-Eric Skiff
http://www.glitchnyc.com
I started reading ebooks on my old palmIIIx to see if the convenience would make up for the crappy reading experience. About 2 years ago I got a clie NX 60, mainly for the screen and the wireless. Now I'm totally hooked cuz I can read one handed in the dark whenever I have a spare couple of minutes, and I can carry A BUNCH of books. I've borrowed a couple of Pocket PC's to compare and in my estimation they don't . It's just to hard to beat the bright color 320x480 hires screen which translates to more and sharper text on the screen. P.S. I also work from a powerbook and convert lot's of books from Project Gutenberg with Pordible for OS 10. As for pay for play books, you can buy most books for mobipocket or palm reader, which both support some kind of anti-aliased fonts.
What about the Sony Ericsson P900? It's a nice phone with camera, sd slot and a relatively big screen. The only problem would be the software to read the files. Anyone?
LCD is like.. so 90's! e-Ink, which has many times the res, and which requires no power except when updating, is the way of the future.. Sony have this product on the market already:
http://www.eink.com/news/releases/pr70.html
Siemens a few months ago did make an attempt that went quite unnoticed... Try to find a SimPad. It's all you ever need, light, 8" screen (800x600 from what I recall), color. Not lightning fast as far as the CPU is concerned but well... not bad at all for reading.
Gotta find that on eBay. It's mostly known in Germany, if you find a nice supply, let us all know ! ;-)
the new sl-6000 series. Both have full VGA displays, run linux, offer USB storage functionallity and a whole lot more. Only drawback is the fairly high price.
I've read ebooks on a 760, and it's perfect.
Its not a nice screen and supports TXT, RTF and HTML books out the box, with software available for PDF, LIT and CHM. The only minor annoyance is the supplied word processor, pocketword, runs very slowly when a large file is being edited. As long as you dont alter the large file, its fine. There are no good free alternatives. Plays music too, and TV control. Of course, its a MS operating system. You cant directly connect it to any non-windows system. Not good. But if you get a USB securedigital drive, problem solved easily. You might occasionally need a windows box because of the stupid install programs, which expect to see an installed copy of activesync before they extract the cab file you need to actually install the software via SD card. Once youve done that once, you have the CAB file you need for reinstallation. You can put linux on this, but obviously its not an official program and I havn't tested it.
The blurb from their site says it better than I could:
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!
The Electronic Ink E-book reader
Another article
I am quite happy with my Nokia NGage as a book reader. The screen is a little small, but it's remarkably clear and with Mobipocket reader, it's just simple. Files copy over with a standard USB, you can put MMC cards into it, and I always carry it around anyway. I used to have a phone and a Palm M105 for books, so this is real convergence.
2) built in MP3 playing and with the right software, you can play the mp3s and
3) built in camera... yeah it's rather low res, but dead handy if you need one in a hurry such as at an accident and you want to record whare things are in relation to each other and the damage etc... or if you spot something interesting and you want to record it for later (lets you append short notes to the image)
4) plenty of reader software available... no
5) even better... should be quite reduced in price now as the new Zire 72 is out...
6) has USB interface that automagically works in Linux using Korganiser...
7) built in rechargeable battery that gives you several hours life at full brilliance and can be recharged quite quickly via the cradle (doesn't need the PC either when you do that, just the power adaptor and cradle)
All in all a very solid device. I've had mine for a year now and have been very happy until I cracked the screen the other week and am having to go through the rigmarole of getting it repaired... looks like a "new" one will cost less than having the screen replaced...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
One night I wanted to watch internet TV in bed. I didn't own a laptop.. The furniture in my cramped apartment allowed no spot to set the 17" CRT except for the bed. My girlfriend and I share a full size mattress, so I had to hold the 17" monitor in my lap to watch it. Still, I enjoyed the experience.. though CRTs in bed do tend to flip over if you step right in front of them. You can flip them right ought of bed in fact!
Weasel is awesome, I don't understand why one would use anything else.
Any non-picture book can be represented as a textfile. Copy and paste from a PDF or a web page, or use Clit to remove Microsoft's drm if you are so unlucky. Of course Project Gutenberg is king of books.
Just run the txt file through makeztxt and off you go.
After email, my web browser, and vim, Weasel is probably the program I spend the most time with - and it is reading so what good times they are...
Happy reading!
since 5 years now. And I'll probably keep it for a couple of years longer.
Actually the monochrome and low res is an advantage, because the pixels are much sharper and bigger. It makes the reading experience much more of a pleasure for me.
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
I'm not sure that's really true (and several follow-up articles claim otherwise) but even if it is the most important technical attribute of an ebook is not necessarily its screen resolution. I would argue instead that battery life is more imporant in an ebook, at least once screen size (more than resolution) gets to the point of "good enough."
The old monochrome Palms had excellent battery life, more than good enough for ebooks. Their problem was that the screen was so small and had such poor resolution that they could display very little per page. Even so, I read a lot of books on my Palm 5000 ... then Palm V ... then Visor Edge.
I much prefer the reading experience on my Clie NR70; the long screen puts a reasonable amount of text up at a time, and its resolution is easily good enough to be extremely readable. I rather wish, though, that I could sacrifice color for improved battery life: 8 hours is about the best I manage, and that's just not enough while travelling. I end up dragging along a recharger, and even that doesn't help on airplanes.
But even more important than battery life and screen size/quality is simply software availability. If you can't get readers for DRMed formats you're locked out of most of the ebooks on the market, and virtually all of the contemporary stuff. DRMed documents are widely available in only four formats: Adobe, Microsoft, Mobipocket, and PalmReader. Adobe's format sucks rocks in every way possible (poor quality software, poor pagination, long conversion times before you can download to the PDA, poor use of screen real-estate, totally inflexible DRM). I haven't used Microsoft's. Mobipocket has the best reader ergonomics of anything I've used, and its DRM is not egregious although I don't like the four device limit. PalmReader gives the best overall experience of any DRMed format -- very usable reader and the DRM is unlocked by typing in a credit card number; no device lock at all, and yet I'm not real inclined to hand out that number to many people.
In my mind, and in my experience with the 5000L, the Zaurus loses right out of the gate because of its lack of DRMed ebook reader software -- easily the most important trait if you want to read ebooks on your device. Without that you can't get content, and without content you don't really have an ebook. Additionally the 5000L had pretty poor battery life, but perhaps that improved with later models (the screen readability certainly did, the 5000L was pretty dark). The 8 hours my Clie gives me is bare minimum for battery life. I'd really like to see at least 20 hours.
So I say "skip the Zaurus" at least as an ebook reader. It's expensive and it just doesn't have the software you need for the job. That's too bad, because other than that it's a pretty nice platform.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
I have read many of those books from Baen on my Nokia 6600 using Mobipocket Reader. I always have my phone with me... and now I'm never bored while waiting since I always have something to read. Except on airplanes.
-rickmode
Small, cheaper than a Zaurus, Linux available.
Unfortunately the vast majority of PDAs have no thumb controls, so it's impossible to hold them comfortably in one hand and also use them one-handed for extended periods. 4-way joysticks for gamers? No problem! Thumb controls for book readers? Say what?
I had been using the HP Jornada 568 as my book reader exclusively for the past year or so: it was about the only device that had a hard flip-up screen cover and thumb controls, both features I consider essential. But when HP bought Compaq they trashed their own PDAs in favor of the Rube-Goldberg iPaqs. They provided me an iPaq at work and it was horrible: it ended up in my drawer.
So when the battery started to go again, I figured there probably weren't any new stock Li-Ion batteries available for it, and in any case I was tired of carrying two handhelds - the Jornada as a book reader and an old Visor as a PDA - and "upgraded" to a slower but higher resolution Sony Clie SJ22. It's a great deal right now, under $120 from places like Overstock.COM, and the crisp 320x320 screen is great... with the freeware replacement fonts I can read it comfortably with or without my glasses.
If price is no object the new Clie TH55 looks good, it's got a 320x380 screen and a hard cover but no gimicky fold-out keyboards so it's actually thinner (if a little longer) than my SJ22. But at $400 it's out of my budget.
My trusty old Palm Tungsten T has not let me down yet. I read books on it all the time (PalmReader), and occasionally use it to peruse the odd Acrobat document. Not sure how portable the Acrobat stuff is from a linux platform though, as it needs to go through a conversion process before it gets to the PDA (iirc).
Screen is very clear and readable, and the battery lasts for ages. I'm sure the other newer tungstens do an even better job.
You fool! You've given cheese to a lactose intolerant volcano god! Do you know what that means?
Palm-based devices can use WeaselReader. You can easily import texts with make-ztxt and pyrite publisher and the zTXT-format is very compact (zlib-based compression).
I've used a second-hand PalmVx for a while and now I'm using Handspring Treo 270, an integrated GSM and Palm. Treo270 (or CDMA variant Treo300) is a good set, but display doesn't do well in sunlight and AFAIK Treo270 is nowadays discontinued.
I'd recommend some cheap Palm (or palm-clone).
Couple more points:
I'm syncing with OS X and there's working Palm sync with UNIX/Linux that I had been using with the Visor before I switched to Mac.
Microsoft reader is tied with Adobe Reader as the stupidest e-Book solution ever. Both of them insist on trying to make reading an e-Book just like reading a paper book. Microsoft Reader has the edge on just plain ugliness in its lack of controls and configurability... and the time it takes to bring up a list of books, but Adobe's faithful imitation of page boundaries on a handheld may just win it the booby prize. Even when I was using the Jornada and MS reader was an option, I didn't consider buying a single eBook in the format... I *have* spent hundreds at Fictionwise and Webscriptions, though, on multiformat books (mostly using Mobipocket Reader).
The best one I ever had was on old HP Jornada which has a decent enough colour screen, a (removable) metal cover flap that protected the screen well and doubled as a sunshade while reading came with the Acrobat Reader and MS Reader, and had free/shareware readers for other files (it was an early Windows CE machine).
Unfortunately nowadays the battery is suffering from old age, making it a bit less useful.
The key useful bit was the wheel at the top of the left-hand side. It made it extremely useable for reading - just nudge the wheel down to scroll to the next screenful.
Newer Ipaqs have lost this functionality - both the cover flap and the wheel are gone. My latest one, an Ipaq 5550, is great except for reading - you have to scroll with the front joypad button. Annoyingly there are volume buttons where the wheel should be, with up/down - if they could be made into next/previous page buttons, I would be very happy indeed, but alas it seems impossible.
It's a pity, as apart from that the 5550 is a joy to use, the screen is wonderful and the battery life very impressive, the Bluetooth/GPRS/VPN combo is incredibly useful and the version of Worms for Windows CE is too much fun!
Seems when HP and Compaq got together they didn't quite get some of the choices the right way round. Shame.
Battery life sucks on the T3 and I found it to be unusable for any real reading. Furthermore, very little software actually supports the T3's 320x480 mode; most annoyingly, the Plucker ebook reader doesn't.
- Anti-aliasing is mediocre at best. Resoltion does make up for it somewhat...
As far as I can tell, PalmOS doesn't have support for anti-aliasing. If you are seeing it, it's an application specific hack.
The T3 was a huge disappointment.
Funny that this comes up right now - because it was only yesterday evening that I happily decided that I now finally have a pretty perfect eBook reader: A Sony Clie TH55 with Plucker, using the new anti-aliased 'Utopia' fonts. Simply beautiful at 320x480 pix, easy navigation, fullscreen-mode (nicluding landscape), long battery life, good price (350-400$). [And I'm not even mentioning the rest of the fun... WiFi, Bluetooth, Movie- and Voicerecorder, Video- and MP3-Player ...plus the full Palm universe...]
Try Siemens Simpad.
They're out of production, so you can buy them really cheap (300eur in Germany, 200eur in Poland). It's Windows CE on ARM 200MHz, but you can easily flash it with Linux (OPIE or GPE; Opera on Opie in 800x600 is just awesome).
It's around A5 size, quite light and has 800x600 screen. There is PCMCIA slot (for compact flash and/or wifi, or even pcmcia hdd) and it works >4hrs on a single charge.
You can start your journey at http://www.opensimpad.org/
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
On the low end, eBookman is a good etext reader. Unfortunately, it uses AAA batteries. There are a couple of them for sale on ebay and you can use mobipocket reader software for text, html and other formats. On the high side, check out Hiebook http://www.hiebook.com/ . It's a bit bigger but you can import/create etext files for this unit. I have been using ebookman for about ayear now and it's a good etext reader. I don't like the backlight and generally don't use it.
... I'm looking for the moon, preferably on a stick. I'd like it to run ZX Spectrum BASIC (NOT Micr$oft BASIC) and be able to share files with my pet cat Linus. Oh, and it has to be as cheap as possible. Does something like this exist?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Over the last 5 years, I've used a Palm IIIxe, a low-res b/w Clie s360, and most recently, a Zaurus 5600. Of all of them, I'd pick the s360 as the best device for ebook reading.
The palm was fine on battery life, and replaceale batteries meant you could grab a set anywhere, with NiMH AAA's doing the bulk of the work for me. The s360's battery life was still good, but not as good as the palm. Zaurus battery life, on the 5600, (which has a larger battery than the 5500), is probably 5-6 hours straight with the backlight on a low setting, and several days worth if you only use it a few hours a day.
Pros
Cons
To deal with
Overall, the Jog Dial on the Clies get's them my vote for the best. I've also used my wife's high-res color Clie SJ-22 on occasion, and it seems ok, but small for my hands. For strictly ebook purposes, I'd suggest an older Clie, either low res, or high res b/w. For a general PDA, the Zaurus is great, and the lack of a Jog Dial isn't that big of a deal.
PROS:
CONS:
NOTES:
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First off, no matter what device you go for, get a palmOS device. The reason for this is that you will be using the adressbook/agenda functions of your device too, since you already have the machine; it would be a waste not to. So make sure your device has decent versions of those apps: so get a palm.
.txt and use for example isilo to convert that), you might want to have either a device which has a bit more internal ram, or one which can take CF/SD/whatever card you might want.
:)
Second, don't get hung up on resolution: that doesn't matter that much for pure reading. 160x160 is enough and 32x320 is just overkill (although it is nice of course, it just isn't neccessarry for reading!).
Thirdly, get a colour device. It's kinda obvious, but I'll say it anyway: with a colour device you can read in true black and white, which is best for reading long texts. All those monochrome devices out there are not black and white: they're grey and black, or green and grey or whatever: they will strain your eyes more than a true colour device.
Fourth, find out where you read. Any device is good indoors, but if you do a fair bit of reading in sunlight, you will have to get a newer machine, because they have screens which can actually be read outside in sunlight.
Fifth and finally, don't get hung up on memory that much. Sure, it's nice to have 128mb to spare, but remember that a large paperback takes up about 200-400 kb. That's less than half a meg. Old devices (like my IIIc) have 8 mb. Which means that with all the other apps I have on there (and it is a fair number), I still have about 8 books in there too.
However, if you read a lot of pdf's (but why would you read that crappy format? It's better to copy/paste the text into
So, to recap: get a colour palmOS device, and the price will depend on if you read many, many large files and want to be able to read outdoors in bright sunlight.
Or wait for e-ink devices to hit the market
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Then, install these apps:
The device itself runs on Linux with Trolltech's QT/Embedded, and ships that way from the factory. Although there are not yet any Linux tools to sync with the newest ROM versions (MacOS X tools may exist), there are these workarounds available:
- You can install a VNC server on the PDA to help you with data entry, and use rsync to back it up. (This is my preferred method.)
- You can re-flash the unit with any of the numerous custom ROMs out there. Check out OpenZaurus, which is a Free Software fork of the QTopia environment that comes with it. TrollTech's free QTopia Desktop is available for Linux and can sync with that, as can several other tools like KitchenSync. Or, you can check out PDAXROM (formerly Cacko) for a true X11-based environment.
The device does use a USB port, and can do USB Ethernet to communicate with your desktop. I prefer to use a 802.11b CF card, though. Depending on your model, it comes with either the high-power or standard battery built in. Unlike many other PDAs, the battery is user-replacable if you remove the back cover (which is held in place by a lock switch). This is a nice feature; you can have spare batteries on hand if you will be away from AC for a long time.The one requirement of yours that it will fail is price. Depending on the unit, expect to pay at least $600 (some of the higher-end ones go for that much on ebay). But this unit is much more capable than $600 units from Palm, Sony, or HP/whatever. It really does behave similarly to a laptop, given that it runs a *real* OS. A quick scan of the Zaurus Software Index will reveal all sorts of programs, and you can easily compile others (yes, you can run gcc on the Zaurus itself, too). If you look at it in that light, it's good deal.
Check out Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook
It's a fun, Computer Geek Oriented Fantasy Novel, which is the start of a fun series.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
While I read ebooks on my Palm Tungsten C, my old Palm V was the best ebook reader I ever had. In general you want something that has a backlight for reading in the dark, but something that you don't need the backlight for normal reading.
You can also find thousands of eBooks, no DRM, at:
http://www.fictionwise.com/
No relation, just a very satisfied customer. You can even get Asimov's and Analog magazines there; individual issues or subscriptions.
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
I have been using my Clie to read fiction e-books for the last ~3 years. I did have many weeks when I was able to read a book per day and I found that my lo-res 160x160 BW screen was a perfect fit.
Unlike the higher resolution models that Sony produces now, the lo-res screen presents a rather blocky, but easily readable text. What I found when I tried to upgrade to newer models of Clie, was that the 320x320 screen made the lines of the letters much to fine for me to read continuously for hours. When the letters where in the bold typeface they could be seen clearly, comparably to 160x160 screen with normal typeface, but I was unwilling to have all my text in bold. I have decided to keep S360 and fear the day that it will die on me. While it is no longer produced, I have seen some sold on ebay.
Also, as in other Sony handhelds, the jog wheel makes a great addition to the e-book reading experience, and the additional bonus of 16MB of memory can easily fit 20 full length novels for a week at the lake.
Some PEG-S360 specs:
No, I'm not kidding. I know they're way out of the range of the price of the buyer, but having owned a few PDA devices and now being on my second Tablet, I can tell you without a doubt that the TabletPC is (at least for me) right now the ultimate platform for e-books.
:)
My current tablet, a Toshiba M200, has a 1400x1050 resolution 12" screen on a laptop about 4 lbs in weight. With the right battery settings I can get over well 4 hours of battery life with pretty good screen brightness, and that's with the wireless radios turned on. It's got the newer 802.11g Centrino stuff on it, with a 1.5Ghz processor (when I got it the 1.7Ghz was virtually unavailable, now it only runs you $200 extra), built in bluetooth, and a GeForce FX 5200 with 32MB of VRAM (not a lot, but it can run older games pretyt well).
As for reading, it's incredible for e-books. I'm currently reading Free Culture (Lawrence Lessig's book) on it and will be reading Cory Doctorow's second book next. I read his first (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) on my old tablet, an Acer C110 and it was a great experience. This one is even better - the screen is almost as sharp as paper. The resolution also helps - in portrait (vertical) mode I have 1050 horizontal pixels, which allows for reading the web with no horizontal scrolling on most web pages (most tablets use 1024*768 screens, which makes it so you have to scroll on pages designed designed for 800*600 when viewing in portrait mode).
I actually read about 50% of the Harry Potter books on a PDA device (I'd read on the PDA while riding the train to work, and read the real book at home), an having done the PDA thing and the Tablet thing, I can wholeheartedly recommend a Tablet over a PDA any day of the week. It's of course somewhere around 2-3k depending on accessories, but hey. It's not exactly a single purpose device.
-Jack Ash
then you will have to get a pocketpc device. on the other hand, as long as you have additional battery, you can make it last long enough.
The install program dies under Windows if you don't have your Palm Desktop installed to the "default" directory. If, for example, you're using e:\palm\ for your Palm install program, you get an error message that it couldn't find the Palm Desktop.
This article in their web site tells more.
It's clear that instead of fixing their installer, they've chosen to make people jump through some hoops after searching their help forums.
Broken Installers are not worth my time, especially for a commercial application.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I have a Casio E100 which runs Windows CE 2.11 and have read dozens of books on it while riding the train to work. The software allow me to change the font type and size and the thumb wheel worked great for paging allowing me to use it in one hand. I have a leather case that flips open and makes for easy access and quick put away.
My new job has given me a Palm m505 which I tried to use for reading as well, but it just does not work well. The screen is smaller, lower res, and not as bright, and you need two hands to page. If you ever need to take notes the Pocket PC JOT is easier to use than Graffiti. But I have not tried the newer versions.
I would recommend looking for year or two old PocketPC that has good reviews on the screen. Then see if you can get one in your hand for fit and paging ease, remember you will do a lot of paging.
I agree completely, at least for reading paperbacks and stuff that doesn't have a lot of graphics.
The m125 comes with a USB cradle, but it does NOT charge your batteries inside the unit.
Speaking of rechargable batteries, nickel metal-hydride AAAs work very well, _if_ you install Battery Panel, which will adjust the internal voltages for different battery types. Also, it's likely you will need to insert a thin piece of cardboard behind the battery contacts on the _left_ side of the battery compartment (as viewed from the back of the unit). This will allow your rechargables to make proper contact. There is something weird about the stem length on rechargable AAAs that is different from Alkaline AAAs, and the m125 seems to be designed to make it difficult for rechargables to work right. A thin piece of cardboard as described above (like from a manila folder) does the trick.
I use the Invert Hack to make it _much_ easier to read at night (it inverts the backlight).
Plucker works very well as a reader, and its autoscroll feature works quite nicely. For reading pure text, Weasel Reader may have a slightly better-looking autoscroll, but Plucker can read _so_ much more stuff (including HTML docs). You can even hook up the autoscroll speed controls to the buttons on the Palm, so that you don't ever have to touch the screen while you're reading. With a 64MB SD card, you can store way more books than you can read in a year (and then some).
Again, the Palm m125 doesn't work well for reading textbooks, however, because of graphics limitations (160x160 screen with 4 shades of gray). Plucker will attempt to convert graphics for you, but unless they're pretty simple, they are hard to decipher.
Just sold my zaurus, battery lasted 2hrs for me.
Loved it but personally i find these things useless if they can't operate for about 18hours / a working day constantly.
Hence I have no PDA or laptop even though I'd benefit greatly from one that lasted long enough.
A blog I run for the wealth
I'd add Newton books to the list of formats that the e-book reader should read. There are still tons of them around out there available for free (many which aren't available in other formats), plus the software to create them is freely available and the file format specifications for them are widely available.
See this project for some further information on working with Newton books.
One other little thing (that's sort of an e-book format in a high-tech sort of way) that I'd like to see on every PDA / e-book reader is a Z-Machine (with a Glk virtual machine being an extra bonus) that can be used for er, well, interacting with interactive fiction.
The specifications are easily available (for both Z-Machine and Glk) and so could be pretty readily implemented into any PDA or e-book reader by any competent programmer.
I personally use a sj22, you can now get them for about $100. It has a color screen, sync's via usb, and works fine with linux.
The internal 16mb memory is enough to hold about 20 books. If you get a 64mb memory stick to go with it, you can hold a veritable library on the thing.
There is a program called txt2pdb for linux which I've found very useful, it allows you to convert text files into palmdoc files you can read on your clie. I have to do this enough that I just put all the texts into a folder and sort by author.
I wrote a little perl script which uses the filename to file in the book title and author and basically just trees through the directories recursively and converts all the txts. (Not really worth passing around, it only took an hour to write and I'd have to find it). For project gutenberg this could be just the thing.
Although the sj22 has a decent res color screen (320x320) I still don't tend to look at pdf's on it as much. If it's fiction or other reading without graphics then I'll convert the pdf to a palmdoc. If there are lots of graphics then I find a handheld (any handheld) really has too small a screen.
I usually use mobipocket to read, if I remember right it's around $20 and you can get a pocket oxford dictionary for it, so that you can highlight words and instantly retrieve a definition without leaving the reader or losing your place. Actually you never lose your place as the program retains this even when you leave the app. It also has decent font support to make the screen look good. The jog dial can't be beat for turning "pages".
It's true there is a newer palmos out than what comes on the sj22, but there are plenty of apps that will run just fine on it, including all the readers I know of.
There are people who will tell you reading on a handheld is excruitiating torture or some such nonsense. That's absolutely ridiculus, I find it to be infinately more pleasant than reading a paper book.
As I said, it's lighter, you never lose your place, it requires the use of only one hand, and it's backlit. It will hold a charge for about 3 days and has an internal battery.
I'm fairly sure this meets ALL of the requirements you listed above at a great price, see ebay.
The TH55 has my vote, it has a 320*480 screen, while it does not natively support landscape viewing, PalmReader and TealDoc, two excellent document viewers have their own landscape mode. Battery life is excellent, it has built-in wi-fi (and bluetooth if you purchase a European model), a crisp high-res reflective screen (meaning you can switch off the backlight and reflect what ever light is around to further prolong battery life), is nicely thin and sexy ;)
The Zire 71 has a nice 320 x 320 color display and long battery life. It only has 16MB of built in memory but has a SD memory card expansion slot. The Zire 71 also has a built in camera that is much more handy than you might think. It will also play audio books, MP3s and video. You can find these for < $200 now. I think this is one of the highest value PDAs on the market.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
Mobipocket supports the full hires+ in both landscape and portrait. It also has a free publisher for win32 called.. cleverly... Mobipocket Publisher, which can import .doc, .rtf, .txt, and .html, and export to both Mobipocket's compressed HTML as well as Microsoft's .lit format.
Mobipocket ALSO natively supports both Palm DOC format and their own compressed HTML format.. as well as having pretty damn good anti-aliased fonts.
I carry my T3 in my pocket all the time and the flip cover that came with it works fine.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Aging eyes drove me to the SJ30 (refurbished, but ebay would've been cheaper). OS 4 (slow); takes a Memory Stick (vital for storing books!); 32mb; good backlight, 320x320.
.TXT.
I read walking up the 22 flights of stairs from my Siberian cubicle to where the people who pay me sit in their tower offices, my doctor approves.
Hold Clie in one hand; wrap the firmly attached soft flip cover over and through a couple of fingers; place thumb on down-button.
Use WordSmith, hi-res fonts.
Choose Full Screen. Display Option and pick a font suitable -- small (14 lines of text/screen) for curled up in the sleeping bag in the mountains; midsize (8 text lines/screen) for climbing stairs at work or riding the subway; large (5 lines) for walking home from the station.
NOTE: I came very close to being newsworthy the other day, because I was reading, stepped off the curb without pausing because I got there just as the WALK light lit up, and nearly got run over by a yup in a BMW who was reading on her laptop and talking on her cell phone and tried to beat the light. I stopped, one foot in the air, just before she blew through the crosswalk and the red light. Did not drop my PDA. She did not drop her cell phone. Both of us dropped our jaws. Kind of a newage accident in the making.
This is ONE thing I imagined about the future, as a kid, that worked out right. Blessings on the e-book newsgroup and Gutenberg et al.
Crucial issue -- if not already a text file, Loading text, using OSX:
Display readable on screen with AppleWorks, Firefox (RTF, HTML) or any other app from which I can select all, then drag to a TextClipping.
Use the invaluable TextSoap, to convert all non-ASCII (curly quotes, long dashes, MicroSoft Ellisis-like things) to ASCII, strip runs of CRS, remove end of line breaks, conserve paragraphs. Export as
Use the invaluable PorDible to turn that to a Palm file. (It'll warn if there were any non-standard characters left in it-- go back and try again, save the original!).
I have used both a palm m505 and a sony clie nx70 for reading the PDA's and the sony clie blows any palm out there away first off:: the sony clie screen is the only high resolution screen on the market, it is also larger than any other screen out there. to further increase the size, rather than having the writing area permamently affixed to the window, you can put it down on the "taskbar" so that you have even more window space. pluss it has the ability to put a wireless card in (which i did, and use all the time) so you can sync up your books from anywhere with wireless also it has a 200mhz proc. (several times faster than most out there) so there are no delays when you scroll down (my m505 had delays and it was top of the line when i bought it) also, the battery life is great, and if your batteries do wear out replacements are only like 25 bucks off ebay (including shipping) so that's nice and affordable the backlight on the PDA can not only be turned on and off, but also adjusted from dim to very bright and i have not found any conditions where the screen is not easily readable overall i would give the nx70 a five star rating, i couldnt ask for more. I read a lot, and every book i read is on the clie.
Red Hat is for people who hate Windows, FreeBSD is for people who love Unix.
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