gjw

Microsoft Reader has a progress bar.
It even tells you how many pages are left.
Tap and hold the page number to toggle it on.

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Lancaster

Originally Posted by arcticmaniac

I use eReader and its not a bad program. You can change the background. What would be great for MS reader would be the ability to "read" various formats like pdf, lit, doc, txt, so that all the books you own won't be obsolete.

I use MS Reader for *lit files, but it would be nice if they could fix it to view other formats, including Palm pdb files. Then I could uninstall an other reader.

Other suggestions relating to background colour, margins etc are good ideas and should be trivial to implement.

So come on msreadergirl - go and make a name for yourself!

Regards

Martin

Ermordung

I would also like to see the option of automaticly starting in the book where I left it, without going through the library and title page. Maybe in settings you could choose the way to start, and additionally, if you closed in the library, you will open in the library (in the mode I'm proposing)

MariEmerald

What I'd like MS Reader to d0:

- Allow me to search the entire book a particular word of phrase
- Read the text in a flowing, less computerized fashion
- Change the font of the text


by Mari
Driven Entrepreneur

BaronStaring

What I would really like any eBook reader to do is let me scroll the text one line at a time.

One of the great advances of eBooks when they came out was getting rid of the outdated notion of "pages". The first readers came out and were fantastic, I could rest my eyes on the screen where I liked (usually about 1/4 down the page) and at the end of each line scroll the next line up to my point of concentration. Using this method I could read very quickly, get extremely engrossed in a book, and had almost zero eye strain. That was about 5 or so years ago on my old Palm. Went several years with no PDA and now have my Ax. It seems in the intervening time some group of morons have decided that forcing paginated reading to make it seem like a "real" book is important. That's like saying lets put speed limiters on all cars to limit max speed to 3 mph and not allow roofs, just to make the experience more like walking.

If you want to have a "paged" mode fine, add it in, even make it the default if that's what gives you your jollies. But let me go back to scrolled reading. Every time I have to change pages and move my eyes from the bottom of the screen to refocus on the top, it breaks my concentration and adds to eye strain. What's even more bizzare it that they have now added autoscrolling so now I can either read the book one page at a time, or read it scrolling at a set and constant rate, but not at my speed which can vary throughout a book based on the complexity of the material. I read a lot of books from Project Gutenberg. Some light reading, like Pride and Prejudice or A Princess of Mars, I scan the entire book at a fairly constant rate, however, when I'm reading Einstein or Maxwell my reading speed varies dramatically from section to section based on my familiarty with the subject and the complexity of the math presented. Autoscrolling just doesn't cut it, I'm constantly having to adjust the scroll speed and that is more distracting than paged reading, however, paged reading invariably cuts pages mid-equation, or just as bad, mid-concept. Having to "flip" back and forth between two pages while trying to understand a concept was irritating in school, and is maddening now, when there is no real justification for it. It is even worse having it on the PDA than in real books, because you can at least get a decent amount of text on a real page, while an eBook page contains approximately 1/3 of the information (words) that a standard size paperback page holds. Let alone a college textbook size page.

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eclips

why not try some other readers?
there is mobipocket reader - that can scroll exactly as you described (there is a free and pay versions - not sure if the free version allow the scrolling) - you can also change the background color. and if you are reading from Project Gutenberg (as I am), you might want to try gowerpoint ureader - this is what I'm using - it can read rtf, text, html,pdb and some limited pdf support. You can even zip them with the cover image and it will display it correctly. it also support very cool skins.
you need to get used to the interface though, and it is not free.
hope it helps....

BaronStaring

Actually MobiPocket is my main reader right now and the Palm version is what I used before, but as far as I can find none of their current versions allow line-by-line scrolling, at least not the PPC free version, and not the "trial" full version that can be downloaded. Nothing on their website implied that a paid-for full version would have it, so all I lost by staying free is the autoscroll, which drove me nuts. It has paged and the pay for version has autoscroll, but that's it. I use it enough that I will probably go ahead and buy the pay version anyways, just to give them compensation for something so useful to me. Other things about Mobi that are a pain, is that you can manually assign catagories to books, but you can't make the catagories screen the default open screen, and it doesn't really seem to like either VGA or QVGA. Certain things are wonky in either setting.

I've also tried gowerpoint's reader. Getting it to install and run was a pain, and while it has a huge number of customization settings compared to Mobi, it still doesn't offer line-by-line scrolling. In addition, I tread to read some PDFs and was working with the settings to see if it would display the formatted text better, now every time I try to open the reader it immediately crashes. It looks like I'll have to reinstall at this point, but I'm not sure it's worth it. When it was working, I didn't get to spend enough time on it to get used to the interface. I don't know that I wouldn't like it, but it was definately non-intuitive from a Mobi users point of view.

Adobe's PDF reader is just as annoying on PPC as it is on XP.

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Bleyn

One item I'd like to see added to MSReader is a technical improvement. That is the ability to trigger repagination of an ebook while still in MSReader. This would be much better than what you have to do now to do that. Which is to get out of MSReader, open up File Explorer, go delete the annotation file for the book, then get back into reader, open the book again, and let it rebuild the pagination.

This is something that I have to do a fair bit. Admittedly, I think part of it might be that I prefer to have my ebooks on an SD card instead of BIS or Main Memory. But I have a goodly collection of them, and really don't want to either suck up lots of Main Memory on books, or pick and choose which ones I have on my Ax at that time. And yes, I know it has to do directly with them being on a memory card. For a fair while, I was mainly using a Kingston 512MB card. And if I read my books directly from that card, I would regularly end up with "Microsoft Reader has lost access to the book". This would happen about every 50 to 100 pages and the repagination did not help. The only thing that did work was shifting books from the SD card to Main Memory while actively reading them, and back again when done. While in Main Memory, I would have absolutely no trouble with the same book, even without touching the annotation file. Recently I got a SanDisk 1 GB SD card, and with it, I might have to delete an annotation file once or twice. And usually I can tell it's about to be needed because the text will stop in the middle of a paragraph about halfway up a page, and when I flip to the next page it won't be a new chapter. I go through that rebuild process, get back to that part of the book, and the text would indeed go all the way to the bottom of the reading area.

It would be much nicer if there was an option within MSReader to do that repagination without having to get all the way out of the app. Admitedly, I know if would probably mean that MSReader was just deleting the file for me, and anything like drawings and bookmarks would go with it. But anything would be better than where it stands now.

Of course, the ideal solution would be for the development team to fix the pagination schema so that it doesn't develop these issues to start with. But depending on how the .LIT format is written, I could see that requiring a major rework somewhere.

captobie

I've been a big fan of MS Reader ever since my first PDA almost five years ago. It's kind of a disappointment that the current version looks and feels a lot like version 1.0 (to me, the only "visible" enhancement is the ability to read secure e-books).

The two biggest enhancements I'd like to see on Reader are:

1. The ability to use folders in the library to organize books (after five years my library has gotten quite large).

2. Some sort of synchronization ability with the PC version. Specifically, I'd like to read a book on my Axim, drop it in the cradle, and automatically have my reading synched. Then I can open the PC version and pick up where I left off in the story. Seamlessly.

Heck, I'd even be willing to pay for software that would allow me to do #2 above! :approve:

wmrawls

I agree about the folders for the Library. Mine is very large since I have most of a 1 gig Compact flash full of books. I usualy use File Explorer to navigate to the book I want to read but the folder option would be nice from within MS Reader. I also agree about the look of the reader staying the same but that is really not an issue to me because I like stability and one of the things about some of the other readers I have used (and I have tried them all) is that they are difficult or confusing to navigate through all of the options.....oh I know lots of people that use the other styles of readers will poo poo my saying that but remember its how I percieve the easy or difficulty to be that is important.

KPM

I want a VGA version where I can choose a much smaller font so I can have more than three sentences on a page!

I also want a version that works with Windows Mobile 2005 so I don't have to keep seeing that stupid message about MS Reader not being able to access my SD card anymore.

rickh57

I agree about WM2005. I read a lot on my Axim and it is kind of anoying to be reading along and get the "can't access this book" message.

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