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

PSP?

[AtariAmarok]

Seeing all the PSP hype, with the screen that even looks great when someone holds it up to a camera on TV, I wonder if that will make a fantastic ebook reader.

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?!?

You need rbmake

[damiangerous]

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

print it out

[St. Arbirix]

I have a PDA that I used to read books on, and then an iPod that I used to read books on. Then I discovered book folds.

Print that sucker out. Our campus labs use Word which does two things I've never figured out how to replace on Linux:
1) Text editing on linux (as far as I can tell) only does things line by line. In Word I can treat the whole document as one big string which makes converting a Project Gutenburg text to a sensibly formatted document involve 3 find&replace commands. (newline to |, || to newline, | to space)
2) Book fold printing. I put the text at a <8pt font (i can read at 4pt), give it 0.2" margins, and set the page as a book fold of 12 pages. It prints out double sided and I simple fold every three pages together to create a physical book. The latest Harry Potter book cost me 35 pages which folded down into a neat little booklet I can fit in my interior coat pocket.

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.

e-ink!

[n0d3]

I think you are looking for something that uses e-ink. The only one that currently is out on the market is sony's E-book

I know Philips (One of the main minds behind it) isn't ready to mass produce because they want to increase the switching speed (from black to white and inbetween) aswell as adding color.
However I've seen them work, at let me tell you, it's sweet technology. It reads very comfterably.

The Everlasting Newton

[IpseDixit12]

The Newton's large screen makes it wonderful for reading text, even though it is in green.

REB1100 and ebookwise-1150

[zonem]

I have been using the REB1100 to read ebooks for years, and have recently purchased 2 ebookwise-1150 models for myself and my girlfriend. They are priceless! For the reb1100, I used the rbmake tools in Linux and the old rocketlibrarian in windows. Other shave posted links to rbmake.

Now, the ebookwise-1150 has a number of advantages over the REB1100. The battery life isn't quite as good, but it makes up for it in features. The interface is a little nicer, and the book won't lose your place if you keep reading past the "warning, battery low" message. There are other small things I like about it. Overall, I would highly recommend the ebookwise-1150. It contains all the good of the REB1100 and adds a polished interface and upgradeable firmware (this is VERY important).

Now, you can hook it up to your computer with a USB coord and, without even having to register your ebookwise, load books onto it with the "GEB eBook Librarian" (http://www.breeno.org/eBook/). Otherwise known as "ebookwise librarian", this little piece of software can convert many different formats into the ebookwise ".imp" format: txt,html,rtf,doc,etc (including those documents that contain images and hyperlinks). It also becomes the "online bookshelf" you log into from your ebookwise device, from which you will download the books themselves. There is a $15 registration fee but it is well worth it. There's also a shareware/demo version so you can try it out free. Note that unless you have a smartmedia card for your ebookwise, you won't be able to use it in Linux. This is a very small price to pay, imo.

Any more questions, send me an email.

- Eugene