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Nov. 30th, 2007 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillYesterday I had a thought. Maybe I should try reading e-books before I actually spend lots of money on a reader.
I decided try out e-books on my PDA. There's a free download of Mobipocket reader for it, and I can download free unsecured Mobipocke e-books from the Baen Free Library, so it doesn't cost anything. I could see if that "carrying many books around in a small package" thing is really as useful as I think.
Yesterday I fired up the web browser on my palm pilot (something I almost never do, as it takes forever) and downloaded and installed Mobipocket Reader.
At that point I was much cheered to see that the e-books I had (which had originally shown up in Word To Go, and dispayed with html markup imbedded, which was distracting) were in the Reader's library, and appeared to display normally.
Then I tried to download some books from the Baen Free Library, discovering in the process that my PDA web browser is willing to download them, but cannot figure out where to put them, and I can't figure out how to get into its file structure to move things around. So I downloaded the books on my computer and went through the inevitable struggle to get the computer to talk to the PDA.
Speaking of which, I think I have figured out why the PDA is always complaining that the Bluetooth is occupied by some other program—I think I need to select the Bluetooth connection in the Prefs, and wait until the little animation at the bottom of the screen has actually quit before I try to hotsync. But anyway, once I actually got it to sync, I got the .prc files to transfer over reasonably easily, though it took several minutes. Now I am the happy possessor of 1632, 1633, Forward the Mage, Crawling Between Heaven And Earth, Med Ship, and Planets of Adventure.
I will say that, while I don't have much experience synching the PDA with my Mac, precisely because it is such a hassle, I don't consider myself generally technically challenged. But I found the whole process of getting the e-books into my PDA a bit frustrating.
The display is adequate. It's obviously a backlit screen and not e-Ink (but I've never seen e-Ink; is it really as nice as they say?). It displays about 90 words in its smallest type, which is at a guess about like 9 or 10 point in most fonts. The font displayed is not fancy but perfectly adequate. It's nice that it's small enough to fit in a pocket, though sitting on it might be ill-advised.
I will try reading some of the books and see what I think. The format (unsecured Mobipocket) of the books I have is also one of the formats the Kindle will read, so presumably my download time has not been wasted whatever happens.
Also I have been pointed toward the Bookeen Cybook Gen 3 as a possible e-book reader. I have checked that out somewhat, and will consider it further. I like that it supports more formats natively than the Kindle, but dislike the thought of being shut out of Amazon's content (though that's Amazon's bad, not the Cybook's, and the Kindle would shut me out of secured Mobipocket content (or the subset of it that is not using Amazon's DRM--apparently Amazon books are Mobipocket, just with a different DRM. Just to be difficult, I guess.)
Yesterday I fired up the web browser on my palm pilot (something I almost never do, as it takes forever) and downloaded and installed Mobipocket Reader.
At that point I was much cheered to see that the e-books I had (which had originally shown up in Word To Go, and dispayed with html markup imbedded, which was distracting) were in the Reader's library, and appeared to display normally.
Then I tried to download some books from the Baen Free Library, discovering in the process that my PDA web browser is willing to download them, but cannot figure out where to put them, and I can't figure out how to get into its file structure to move things around. So I downloaded the books on my computer and went through the inevitable struggle to get the computer to talk to the PDA.
Speaking of which, I think I have figured out why the PDA is always complaining that the Bluetooth is occupied by some other program—I think I need to select the Bluetooth connection in the Prefs, and wait until the little animation at the bottom of the screen has actually quit before I try to hotsync. But anyway, once I actually got it to sync, I got the .prc files to transfer over reasonably easily, though it took several minutes. Now I am the happy possessor of 1632, 1633, Forward the Mage, Crawling Between Heaven And Earth, Med Ship, and Planets of Adventure.
I will say that, while I don't have much experience synching the PDA with my Mac, precisely because it is such a hassle, I don't consider myself generally technically challenged. But I found the whole process of getting the e-books into my PDA a bit frustrating.
The display is adequate. It's obviously a backlit screen and not e-Ink (but I've never seen e-Ink; is it really as nice as they say?). It displays about 90 words in its smallest type, which is at a guess about like 9 or 10 point in most fonts. The font displayed is not fancy but perfectly adequate. It's nice that it's small enough to fit in a pocket, though sitting on it might be ill-advised.
I will try reading some of the books and see what I think. The format (unsecured Mobipocket) of the books I have is also one of the formats the Kindle will read, so presumably my download time has not been wasted whatever happens.
Also I have been pointed toward the Bookeen Cybook Gen 3 as a possible e-book reader. I have checked that out somewhat, and will consider it further. I like that it supports more formats natively than the Kindle, but dislike the thought of being shut out of Amazon's content (though that's Amazon's bad, not the Cybook's, and the Kindle would shut me out of secured Mobipocket content (or the subset of it that is not using Amazon's DRM--apparently Amazon books are Mobipocket, just with a different DRM. Just to be difficult, I guess.)
