um96km

I have MSReader, but I am looking for one that would read different formats. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Danneauxs

uBook seems to read many different formats. I believe you can read Palm books, RTF files, TXT files, HTML files etc.

Depending on your needs I personally prefer Haaili Book Reader myself since I just use a few free programs to convert all my .rtf, html, and pdf files to txt. Takes up less room and once you zip them, yes Haaili can can open zip files, they take up very little room.

Hope this helps.

Talyn

MS Reader, Palm Reader, and MobiPocket seem to the the "big players" in the ebook field. Adobe tries, but... PDF just sucks, especially on a mobile device. Of the three others, MS Reader is by far the worst in terms of DRM and style configuration (practically none). All three do allow for ClearType sub-pixel font rendering, however, which can improve text quality on many devices. Both MS Reader and MobiPocket are OEB (Open EBook) compliant, so if you wind up using ConvertLIT to "decompile" a LIT into its source HTML, you can easily compile it into a MobiPocket PRC ebook with the same files.

µBook is also a good reader which supports the most formats, as Danneauxs mentioned. It does read PDB but only Palm Doc format ones, not the newer Palm Reader PDB books. µBook does not allow active navigation such as "Go to Chapter 12" it can only navigate by page numbers. Also it does not support ClearType but uses its own proprietary font smoothing technique, which on my device is a bit blurry but useable. I've contacted the author about getting ClearType added but he doesn't want to now, but promises a major font overhaul in an upcoming version. Additionally, µBook has the most difficult Options scheme I've ever had to deal with, but I guess that's the price for having so many options available.

In the Configuration/Options category: µBook wins, hands-down. Nothing else even comes close.

Speed: I'll vote for Palm Reader, with µBook coming in a close second, then MobiPocket, and MS Reader last.

Ease of Development: µBook gets the win here: .txt .rtf. .html files are by far the easiest to write. MobiPocket and MS Reader come next, since they are both OEB-compliant, they can use the exact same source files (XHTML and an OPF, images optional) and both have free "compilers" to create the books. Palm Reader comes in last, as it relies on its custom PML (Palm Markup Language) for styling/navigation, so the author has to go back into his source files and insert the PML to make the book look and act correctly, so Palm requires the most amount of work to write for.

Danneauxs

Talyn mentioned some very good points. I was not aware the different versions of the PDB. I have a PDB on my PDA (casio be300 - still waiting for my Axim) and Haali Reader opens it just fine, not sure about a newer one. Haaili aslo is suppose to open XHTL, but not rtf ro doc files. I'm told by the author that it will run even better on the Axim so I can't wait to try it.

I agree that uBook's options screens are about the most difficult thing to navigate that I've come across!! Even opening a book seems difficult and un-natural, especially when you have books by certain authors in zip files.

I guess it really depends on what you want your book to look like. As I mentioned I convert e-books from whatever format they are in to txt files; this pares them down in size from most formats except those with some native compression like PDB etc, but I've used converters to change my text files to PDB and those are still larger than just zipping the txt file so I stick with that. If you are interested in color, pictures, etc then you might want to keep the native formats and use a reader that perserve this format. Haali does this well with most but not all. The biggest feature I like about Haali is that you can select ANY font size you want, they are completely scaleable; not just small, med, and large. You can implement clear-type, bold, justifcation etc. You can easily add bookmarks and if you keep the native format use chapters etc.

My suggestion is to simply find all the "free" readers mentioned and try them out, uninstalling those you don't care for. I keep Haali and Mobipocket on my unit, but only the Haali seems to remember that my books are on my Card and remembers what I last was reading. Give the different programs a try and pick the one that suits you. As I'm sure Talyn will agree it's all a matter of taste.

Danneauxs

animoose

Do any of the readers have a way of showing you how many pages there are to the end of the chapter/end of the book? This is the part of the physical book experience I most miss when using MS Reader.

Danneauxs

Haali reader shows the number of remaining pages, this is not the remaining number of screens, but pages as, depending on the size of the font, the number of screens you have to page through varies. So, if you have a font size of 20, you might page through 6 screens before the page number changes, but if you have a font size of 10, it might be only 3 screens. I haven't actually compaired an e-book open in Haali to a physical book so I don't know how acurate the pagination is. There is also a progress bar at the bottom showing how far you are into the book. One neat feature is that if you are only say 20% through the book and you accidently click farther on the be progress bar and get jumped way ahead you can simply click the "back" button in the menu bar and it will bring you back to where you were!

uBook's pagination seems to be screen based. I changed the font from smallets to largest just now and the pages listed in the book changed from 1445 to 6840. Wow, 6840 pages seems daunting, lol.

Mobipocket reader as run on my computer also shows pagination is screens to view. Changing the size of the font changes the number of pages in the book.

Hope this helps.

wcnc

thanks for the heads up on ubook. haven't tried that one before. ms reader is adequate and allows for audible content (audible now has its own 'reader' available for download). adobe pdf reader is sluggish and did not render the same from machine to machine. our study group tried reading journal pdf files on our pdas and the renderings varied from unit to unit (toshiba, dell and compaq) even though they had the same versions. wonder if it was a memory issue...

um96km

Thanks for the input. I’m going to try Haali and uBook and see which one works for me. Do these come with the converters that you talked about or are there other programs that I should be looking for to do that?

Danneauxs

With uBook you should need converters for most formats. I don't think .lit files can be opened though and maybe a few other proprietary ones. Personally, I just don't bother with those formats, but you can search around for them. I think ConvertLIT was mentioned in an earlier post by Talyn, but I'm not familiar with that one. Do a search for rtf2txt and doc2txt and I HAD a program to convert I thik it was web2txt, dropbook will make PDB's and I think Mobipocket has a free converter for this also. But, you should be able to get by with what each reader will open.

Talyn

Quote:

Originally posted by Danneauxs I was not aware the different versions of the PDB. I have a PDB on my PDA (casio be300 - still waiting for my Axim) and Haali Reader opens it just fine, not sure about a newer one.

I ran into that when I tried to get µBook to read a PDB that I had created myself with DropBook. A little research yielded that there is the older Palm Doc PDB, which is little more than a straight text file compressed into Palm format. Palm Doc allows no custom styling - any text formatting such as centering must be done using spaces just like a .txt file would.

The newer Palm Reader type of PDB allows for font styles and text formatting, as well as page breaks and chapters that will appear in the table of contents for quick navigation.

arshield

Quote:

Originally posted by animoose Do any of the readers have a way of showing you how many pages there are to the end of the chapter/end of the book? This is the part of the physical book experience I most miss when using MS Reader.

Some, not by any means all of MS Reader files can tell you the page numbers by holding down on the right arrow at the bottom of the screen. This will tell you how many pages and give you a basic graph to show how far you are.

cageyjames

Jumping in late, but there is only one eBook reader that I use, Palm Reader.

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Later,
James

raelin75

Here's a link Lockergnome for a good ebook reader review:
http://www.lockergnome.com/issues/daily.html
It's for today's (10/23) newsletter.

Kensupen

The one reader I never see anyone mention is iSilo.
www.isilo.com

It's cheap, smallest file size I've seen yet (free convertor), and speed is instantaneous. It can convert .DOC, .TXT, .HTMx and I think one or two others into .PDB, it's own format. It's constantly being updated and has all the features you need. Definitely check it out.

-Kensupen

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