uBook is much better than MS Reader

07-03-04, 10:36 PM

I just downloaded the latest version of uBook from www.gowerpoint.com, and it is FANTASTIC !!!

Anybody not familiar with uBook ... it lets you read eBooks on your PPC in multiple formats, including .TXT .RTF .HTML and also Palm formats .PDB and .PRC

One of the best features, is it can read ebooks which are in zipped (compressed) format. You can just load the .ZIP file onto your PPC, and uBook will read directly from the zipped file.

The zipped file will take up signficantly less space (50% or less) than the original uncompressed ebook file, so you can load more ebooks onto your PPC.

The other really great thing about uBook which makes it 1000 times better than MS Reader, is uBook has an unbelievable amount of options for changing the display such as:

(1) Many different skins are available for free download.

(2) You can view eBooks in Portrait or Landscape format.

(3) You can set the font sizes, font types, font colors, background color, line spacing, and lots more.

After using MS Reader's one available format (.LIT), and then playing with uBooks many input different formats ... there is no comparison. uBook is the winner by far.

And there are lots and lots of free .TXT format eBooks available at places like Project Gutenberg.

And it is simple to convert most documents into a .TXT format. Practically every word processor can save documents as .TXT files.

There is also a Desktop version of uBook also available for free download, so you can read your ebooks on your PC as well as your Pocket PC.

Give uBook a try.

You will be very happy you did !

Pus it's freeware !!! :)

rvdparis · 07-04-04, 06:15 AM

YES, uBook is a terrific program! It even lets you make annotations, comments, bookmarks, highlights, and SAVES them for you in a special file.

My ONLY gripe is that it does not read PDF files. For me it's a problem, since most of the work I do requires reading tons of pdf files. I suppose one can convert PDFs into TXT or RTF or HTML - which I've done, actually, to use uBook, but that won't work with PDFs which are merely scans that haven't been OCRed. Doing that requires ANOTHER step, which just takes too much time.

I've foung Repligo to be useful in this way. In Word, I just send the doc to Repligo on my Axim. In Acrobat, I just print the PDF to Repligo. In nearly all cases, I can re-flow the text so it reads QUITE nicely. PDFs look terrible in Acrobat for PPC - i have issues with tagging and reflowing for some reason - and I CANNOT annotate or mark up docs the way I want to in Acrobat for PPC. Repligo does this VERY WELL - in the next sync, my doc is back on my regular PC, where I can see my new document all marked up. Only trouble so far, I found one PDF which had problems reflowing on my Axim...still looking into this...

IN ANY CASE, uBook is FABULOUS, FREE and BETTER than MSReader, Acrobat for PPC if you are JUST reading, lit, rtf, html, etc. files AND NOT pdfs. I used uBook for quite a while, trying to tweak it and my pdfs, but it was just too much work. Repligo suits me just fine for now. (I did send uBook's terrific developer an email a year ago about that and other specific issues: he's great and fast!).

07-04-04, 07:29 AM

I have just downloaded this amazing program and am just starting to learn all it can do. Thank you so much for the recommendation. It is a slight pity that it won't read *.lit files as well, but that is the only drawback.

rvdparis · 07-04-04, 09:43 AM

sorry, i thought uBook could read .lit files. my mistake! So it can't do pdf or lit. but everything else pretty much.

07-04-04, 11:02 AM

Thanks, looks great, although all I currently have is .lit and .pdf files :(. That's OK, I am going to keep it installed for future use. I'm sure they will add .pdf/lit compatibility in a future release . . . :)

07-04-04, 11:50 AM

An excellent source of free e-books for this reader is www.manybooks.net. They have 10,000. Download the *.DOC format option which becomes a *.PDB.

07-04-04, 03:16 PM

manybooks.net is great !!

I have it listed on my Freeware Post at PDACorps.com, along with many other great sources of free eBooks.

Project Gutenberg is probably the largest source of free eBooks in .TXT format

You can easily create your own ebooks by saving them as a .TXT (plain text), .RTF (rich text format) or .HTML (webpage format - hypertext markup lang).

And as mentioned above, you can just open a .PDF file in Adobe Acrobat, and then save it as a .TXT file

And remember to convert your .TXT to compressed .ZIP files before loading to your PPC. uBook can read the ebook from within the .zip file. It will save you lots of space.