Seeking a Good eBook Reading Device?

Quimbly asks: "I'm an avid reader, and I find that downloading books is much more convenient that trying to get them from the bookstore or library. However, I'm tired of sitting in front of a monitor to do my reading. I'm looking for a hand-held device to do my reading on, and I'm hoping the community has some suggestions. It seems to me that most PDAs have too small of a screen for convenient reading, and a notebook / tablet computer is too big and bulky for this simple task. So, I've been looking at a few devices designed specifically for eBook reading (e.g. the RCA REB1100, the eBookwise-1150, etc.). These look more promising, but I was disappointed to discover that the RCA device ONLY reads an encrypted, propriety eBook format, making it essentially useless. (Has anyone ever hacked one of these?) Similarly, I believe both of these devices have been discontinued by their manufacturers. I want a device that can read a variety of file formats, especially scanned, non-text PDFs. A large screen, long battery life, and good interface are other attributes I'm looking for."

Comments

You need rbmake

[damiangerous]

Free, Open Source .rb format creator: http://rbmake.sourceforge.net/

Re:print it out

[DougWebb]

There's lots of text editing programs for Linux, with a wide variety of features, and I'm sure some can do the find and replace commands you mention. You can do it from the command-line too; here's what I'd do:

$ perl -i.bak -0e '$book=<>; $book=~s/\cM//g; $book=~s/\n/\x01/g; $book=~s/\x01\x01/\n/g; $book=~s/\x01/ /g; print $book'perl -e 'undef $\; $book=<>; $book=~tr/\n/|/;' book.txt

That'll format the book with one line per paragraph. If you do this a lot, you can put all of that into a script instead, so you just have to remember the name of the script instead of the whole command

In file named process_book:

#!/usr/bin/perl -i.bak -0

my $book = <>;

$book=~s/\cM//g; # Unix line endings
$book=~s/\n/\x01/g; # Collapse lines
$book=~s/\x01\x01/\n/g; # Separate paragraphs
$book=~s/\x01/ /g; # Insert whitespace

print $book;

To process a book:

$ process_book book.txt

By the way, notice that I used \x01 instead of |, since | characters might appear in the book.

Re:PSP?

[macshit]

The PSP looks good on TV because it has a fairly colorful and bright display, but it doesn't seem particularly well suited to being an e-book reader:

• The screen is the wrong orientation (you can turn it, but then the controls are awkward), and the long-and-skinny format a bit odd
• The screen is somewhat low-resolution for displaying a reasonable amount of text (though fine for games). I'm not sure how much better you can do with a cheap unit, but a higher-resolution grey-scale display would be much more suitable.
• The PSP is really heavy, it's like a brick, and most of this weight is probably due to components which are completely unnecessary for reading (massive batteries, lots of chips for high-speed graphics).
• It's very expensive -- ideally an e-book reader should be something cheap enough, or robust enough, to just throw in your pocket and always have handy.
• Is there any software for this?!?