So Many eReaders, So Little RAM!
[Part 2 of "Is That a Book in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?"]
In the last article we talked about ebooks in general and where to find them, now we come down to the software to read them with. Most Pocket PC’s still come with precious little memory and you can’t waste it installing several programs that do the same thing, especially if you have to buy each one. Like many users, I found one favorite reader for open (non-protected) books: µBook; and another for those that need a license: MS Reader. If I could, I would use only the one required for the copyright protection, but it is lacking in many features I have grown fond of, not to mention the fact that, like most others, it only reads its own format.
This is a basic comparison on my two favorite readers, not an in-depth review. Many features are not discussed here (especially for µBook), please see each site for more details. There are also other programs, some of which I have never used, and so cannot comment on. My only advice is to try what’s available and simplify, you don’t want to end up with books on many formats that can’t share a reader. Remember that there is no conversion for protected files.
Protected eBooks
I use Microsoft Reader for these, but it is not limited to protected files. Simplifying things, this program is already included on most PPC’s; in any case it’s a free download, easy to install (removable card installation allowed). It must be activated to read protected books, but for that you only need a free registration. Microsoft allows 6 devices activated at any one time and it’s simple enough to request more if needed, so the same ebook can be read on your PPC, laptop, desktop, etc. Reactivating existing hardware doesn’t count towards the limit of 6.
Tip: If you request additional licenses (a form pops up if you’ve reached the limit) wait a day or two and try again, you may not get a notification in the mail that it’s ok to proceed. The current version for PPC’s (2.4.1) is still from 2005, but includes an update for Windows Mobile 5, note that WM2002 users should stick to the previous version.
The MS Reader format (.lit) is widely available, protected or not, but it is proprietary. Not only are .lit files read only by MS Reader, but MS Reader reads only .lit files. If you have MS Word, there are several utilities that allow you to use it (at least versions 2002 or 2003) to convert into .lit, so you can use MS Reader for your own writings or downloaded files in document format (.doc), plain text (.txt), formatted text (.rtf) and Internet pages (.htm). Microsoft’s own version can be found here, but there are others, all of them free. It’s a pain having to convert everything, but if you take the trouble you can manage with only one reader. I believe it’s still the most common format used for ebooks so you will find plenty of choice practically everywhere.
Alas, MS Reader is not perfect; pretty good, but not perfect. Some have issues activating (Fictionwise has good tips on their help area here). For daily use, the bookmarks and annotations are excellent. By the way, annotations and bookmarks are kept on a separate folder, so be careful if you move or rename anything. .lit files are very small, so the space taken in your device is minimal. My biggest pet peeve is that it wastes a lot of screen real estate. Customizing is very limited, even something as simple as adjusting the font only has a few options. The library (your list of books) shows every book anywhere in your device making it slow to load, rendering organization irrelevant, and even showing titles duplicated if there is more than one copy (like in a backup). The library list can be sorted several ways (by title, author, order read, size, date downloaded), but not by location. You can search within a book, but not for a book title, so if your library is very big use your file manager instead and open files from there. There’s no skinning.
Tip on upgrading: If your device has MS Reader built-in you can’t remove it, but if an upgrade is released you can disable the old version and install the new one as any other program. See help files in the same site for details.
Open eBooks
For books on any other format (doc, htm, txt, rtf), I use GowerPoint’s uBook (the official name is µBook, but there were some issues with the non-keyboard character and Windows, so the “u” would do (try saying that 3 times fast! <EG>). µBook is, in my not-humble-at-all opinion, the best reader available. It’s small and easy to skin and customize (a gazillion options!), plus it uses the whole screen without all that wasted space that MS Reader leaves around. µBook always remembers the last book you were reading and returns where you left it very fast. Ditto for the last directory if you go back to Open. It also remembers the last 5 books read without having to return to the file list. If, like me, you read several books at the same time, you’ll love that µBook remembers the last position of every book, so there is no need to bookmark anything unless you are taking notes. There is a built-in dictionary that you can use to look up words without leaving the application. A bigger version is available too if you have the need (and the space) for it.
µBook is not free anymore, but the $15 license goes by name and e-mail address so it covers any devices you own. With some restrictions, it also covers all upgrades. The trial is a full download with all features and only a nag screen to remind you to register. The site provides the program in several languages, some with their own dictionaries. The current version is 2008d, both for the PC and the Pocket PC.
Tip: Like MS Reader, µBook can be installed in a removable card. Annotations and bookmarks are kept with the program files, so make sure you include it in the backups and take care not to rename the books once you start reading them.
What About .pdf?
Many books are available on Adobe format (pdf) and there is indeed a pocket version of the reader. Be aware though that since this format was originated for printing purposes, only the most recently formatted books will work on small screens. If a book is not set to automatically repaginate (”tagged for re-flow”), you will only be able to read it on a desktop monitor or laptop screen. Tagging can be applied through ActiveSync, but you must be able to change the file properties and that’s not always possible, even with unprotected files. Ask for details before you buy books in this format. Follow this link for downloads and FAQ’s. Select “Mobile” as your operating system for the right section. The current pocket version of Adobe Reader is 2.0.
That’s It?
Nope, there are other readers available, and many prefer Mobipocket or Palm Reader (it’s not limited to Palm devices), but having never used them, I cannot speak from experience. Hey, speaking of Mobipocket, just this summer they released an alpha version of their reader, designed for java phones, so all hope is not lost if you don’t have a Pocket PC. Take a peek here for details.
After all these years reading, it is a pleasure to see technology improve and facilitate the perfect pastime and I am always looking forward to the next book.
What are your favorite readers? Why? Pull up a chair and tell us all about it.
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At the risk of annoying people by commenting on my own post, there was something important I left out, TomeRaider! My thanks to bartveld for reminding me.
TomeRaider [http://www.tomeraider.com/] is indeed an ebook reader, but its main feature is the ability to handle huge databases. Do you want the whole Wikipedia on your pocket? Only TomeRaider can handle it. Ditto for things like IMDB, dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibles, etc. Most books available for TomeRaider are not found in any other format because of the size restrictions.
The files can be big, but not unmanageable on flash card, & the reader is excellent with no delay at all in running searches or moving among records. Wikipedia is about 3GB, IMDB not even 160MB.
The current version for the PPC is 3.x (several modes) & costs around $30. Lots of free books included. There are versions for many platforms, from Palm to PC, Nokia, etc.
If there are any expert users around, we all could use some help on how to choose the right download or any other tips. Thank you!
A free, very good, little-known reader is Haali Reader:
http://haali.cs.msu.ru/pocketpc/
Its best attributes are that it is extremely fast, both in normal operation and in starting up, and that there is no clutter or unnecessary information on-screen; everything is focused on the ebook text.
It supports common formats such as TXT, zipped TXT, DOC, PDB and PRC (the last couple are Palm formats) so that books from sites like manybooks.net can be read straight off without conversion being required first.
I have used it heavily for several months and have found no weaknesses worth fretting over.
Thanks, Alastair. I’ve heard about it on other forums, but never seen it first hand. Does it work for .rtf files by any chance? Can it show covers or images? I’ll be very grateful if you could you post or link to some screenshots too. I looked on the site, but everything seems to be text only.
As far as I am aware it doesn’t support RTF, or any other format with styled text, and doesn’t support images of any format; it is plain text only – which is probably why it is so fast.
I remember the same issue (anything other than plain text readers being unacceptably slow) from my PalmOS days.
There is a decent screenshot here (Cyrillic text – the icon bar can be switched off):
http://soft.softoogle.com/scr/screen.php?id=1384
Sorry, Alastair, couldn’t get the page to load, not even the main site. Anyway, for me it’s no good only plain text. I can live without the luxury of color or images, but I think it makes a big difference what the author emphasizes with bold & italics, not to mention different fonts. It depends on the book, certainly, but I think it’s important.
I think the one I looked at was Al Reader – saw it on the xda-developers forums and the English version works really well. Unfortunately, not available yet in newer flavors. I like it better than uBook for most things.
I’m not sure how realistic it may be, but Repligo was a great alternative for reading PDF files that can be pushed through its conversion engine. Very useful to handle things like smart scrolling of text and such. Looks like it’s moved over to mostly Blackberry, though. In a way that’s sad because reading PDF files on a WM device is painful. I’m constantly scrolling around all over the place to read an entire page of text. All I really want to do is just read the text and ignore margins, pages, and such.
Glad to hear that the newer version of Acrobat Reader allows some WM enhancements, but wish they’d come sooner.
Hi, Peter. First I hear of Al Reader, could you get us a link? About Repligo, does it handle the reflowing of pdf files? I thought it would only manage the viewing, zooming. If it works as a full converter, count me in! I have several books on pdf & they look wonderful on my laptop, but none are set to reflow, so there they stay.
Do be careful with Acrobat, it’s a wonderful reader as always, but if the file you are interested is not set for it, you’re out of luck reading on a handheld without the constant scrolling. Make sure before paying for a protected pdf!
I have some graphic novels in pdf, but those need a big screen of course. Regular books that are almost exclusively text, I’ll probably buy a converter add-in for Word, something like that, then make them all into rtf or html in order to put them on the PPC.
I’m a huge fan of eReader (http://www.ereader.com/) and MobiPocket. Both seem to keep updated with a lot of the books I read, and eReader works on a wide variety of devices. Fictionwise recently bought out eReader and seem to be making slight improvements. Each ebook for eReader is locked to a credit card which I find to be a lot easier to deal with than MobiPocket’s device activation that will sometimes not let you change your devices for weeks. You can also reset all of your ebooks using eReader to whatever your primary credit card is on your eReader account (used for buying books over-the-air from the Windows Mobile versions of eReader).
I still find Adobe very lacking unless you can get non-copy protected PDF files and play with them on a PC/Mac to be able to read them properly on a small screen.
All I really want is a somewhat standard when it comes to ebook formats so that they are portable across whatever hardware you want to read them on. I have no problems paying for a reader on more than one device or even a hardware reader like the Kindle…if, and only if, I can somehow retain all of the books that I have purchased elsewhere on that device. That is another reason why eReader will keep getting my support. They are showing by even supporting the iPhone that they are looking out for their customers by supporting the widest variety of hardware that I have seen for DRM’d ebooks.
eReader being easy to activate may soon trump MS Reader’s popularity, especially with the later being such a pain & not updated enough by MS. I understand eReader is free now too, is Mobipocket still for pay? I’m willing to give them a try again if they’re free. Download or convert a couple of books, check out the features, maybe do a Shootout!
Regarding purchases, as long as Fictionwise continues to support multiple formats, they’ll have me as a customer, hopefully they’ll extend that to eReader now that they own it. I’ve had good experiences with their support people too & that’s just as important. Their books are not tagged to any device, & one can download as many times as needed. Of course the format you choose has its own restrictions for activation, but there are none for the site itself, just log in.
On a side note, I must say that all activation issues I’ve ever had with MS Reader have happened on the PPC, never with the laptop or desktop. It’s probably a WM problem rather than the reader itself. For those that have been unable to reactivate a handheld, there is the (slight) consolation that their books can still be read on the PC. Annoying, but not a total loss. With a bit of luck, MS’s support can fix the issue on their handheld too.
Adobe is fine on a big screen, on a PPC it’s still lacking indeed. But then its main function is to preserve format for printing, not mobile reading, they’re just now trying to expand the capabilities. TomeRaider has its own niche too, & it would be hard to push either out of what they do so well. The field of plain vanilla books is wide open though.
Now, what I want to know is why can’t a reader for protected books (any!) read other open formats like doc, txt, rtf or html? uBook does all that, even reads straight from a zipped file, no conversion required, but it can’t touch the protected files. And why can’t I buy a book in eReader format & then exchange it for MS Reader or Mobipocket? The publisher already got paid, right? The seller has a record of my purchase after all & the new/different software is also activated to my name. Too many of us remain attached to a reader because of our old purchases. It shouldn’t be so restrictive to just buy a novel, you know?
Imagine if it were the same with MP3’s! That you had to use only one player or load several types of software into it to play different songs! Imagine if you bought an album in iTunes, but were forced to play it only on an iPod, but your other albums were only good on the Zune. And of course neither one of those players would play the MP3’s you ripped yourself out of your own CD’s; imagine if each one needed additional software or painstaking conversion to play the rest of your songs. And when a company stopped supporting a program, there went your purchases! That’s really where we stand with ebooks. It’s a mess endurable only because of our passion for the written word. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is!
Someone asked me about which readers read which formats, so here’s a quick list, mostly straight out of Fictionwise’s help pages:
Software:
Adobe Acrobat [.pdf]
eReader [.pdb]
Microsoft Reader [.lit]
Mobipocket [.prc]
Palm Doc [.pdb]
Hardware:
eBookMan [.fub]
Hiebook [.kml]
Kindle [.mobi]
Rocket [.rb]
Sony Reader [.lrf]
And yes, the Kindle’s files are in “mobi” format, but Mobipocket reads “prc”. Confused yet? %-} For what I’ve read, the Kindle can certainly read *unprotected* Mobipocket files, but Amazon wants the exclusive for the protected ones, so you can’t read those even if the hardware is capable of it. Trying to override that restriction may lose your warranty with Amazon, so be careful & read the fine print!
“Someone asked me about which readers read which formats”
Yeah, well, that pretty much sums up the main problem with ebooks, doesn’t it? It seems like the early days of video recording.
Indeed, bartveld. And it’s worse with restrictions that are not the same from program to program, let alone with hardware readers.
As I’ve said before, one must compromise & simplify. The space to install programs is very limited in handhelds, so I stick to uBook for anything not-protected & MS Reader for protected (or proprietary) files. I’m willing to try new and/or improved packages, but the lure has to be significant to make up for the inconvenience of having a 3rd program complicating things.
Although my Advantage came with Adobe, I don’t use it, my books on pdf are left exclusively for the laptop. TomeRaider is wonderful, but since I can do a search online with my data plan, I can live without it. Compromise everywhere.
Hi Rosie,
In regard to your previous thread, I’d like to say that yes, my Sony Reader is amazing in sunlight. I took it to the beach and it was great!
Also one more thing, there is a converter out there for the lit format that will break the copy protection off DRMed books called ConvertLit. It may violate the DMCA however, but that is one way around the DRM hassles. My reader uses the .lrx protected format, and it really kind of blows that if I want to upgrade to a Kindle I shall lose the works I purchased for my reader.
Nonetheless using fictionwise and buying lit format seems to be the bestway to protect what you purchase from obselescence due to DRM.
I also use uReader and I am an avid supporter of it.
Hey, VW! uBook is great, isn’t it? (You did mean uBook, right? I don’t know “uReader” ).
I’m looking forward to the future when all screens are the same liquid ink, in bright HD color, whether for watching a movie or reading a book, surfing the net or making a shopping list. Lovely! For now we welcome each tiny step of progress. I remember when the first VGA monitors came up [shh! nobody mention age!], when we moved from the old Casio green screens to touch ones in Palm, then the bright white of PPC’s [didn't I say not to mention age?]. Look at us now. If commercial practices would at least try to keep up with technology we’d be happier (& they’d be richer).
As it is, readers risk prosecution for copyright infringement if we dare use a tool to move a product *we already bought* into another format or gadget. cLit has been around for a while, do you see anyone handing out free ebooks in the corner? A similar tool is been used to read Mobipocket books in the Kindle, again, books already paid for, not stolen or given away. A gazillion warnings, hushed tips, under-the-table downloads & dire threats, all for the equivalent of using iTunes to make an MP3 into a WAV so it can be enjoyed on a car’s CD player.
Oh well, we all do what we can with what we have. The pleasure of writing & reading expands to whatever media is available, from cave walls to cyberspace.
First note – Repligo (at least a while ago) was a converter for documents (including PDFs) that would allow you to “print” your doc to the Repligo printer to convert it. If your PDF doesn’t allow printing, you’re out of luck. However, it did allow easy re-flowing of the text and I appreciated that.
As for AlReader, check here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=325622
I know there are other ones out there, but good luck getting an English version – the translation seems hard to come by for some reason.
Hiya, Peter.
After taking a peek at Repligo’s site, I think it’s now only for Blackberry, although they still refer to several platforms. The links to Handango for purchase are no good anymore, so perhaps the PPC version’s been abandoned since WM2003. Other services are either very expensive or subscription only, mostly geared to companies. If anyone has better details, would you please post tips &/or a link? Thank you.
AlReader looks pretty good, I’ll see how it compares with uBook for me. Thanks for the link.
Ubook is also my favorite reader. One of the biggest reasons is that ubook retrieves books from any file, which many of the more popular ebook programs limit where the user will place his or her books. A file within a file within a file is not a problem with ubook. Additionally, you can even compress your books and ubook will still retrieve them. It doesnt always do pdf files well. When I need accurate rendering of pdf files I use foxit. I wish ubook read pdf a litle better but most of my files are rtf and even pdf will read well enough for casual reading on ubook for me most times.
Hey, c1oudrs, how do you manage pdf files with uBook? I didn’t think it could read those!
Another favorite feature for me is the ability to take any picture & use it as book cover, simply by giving it the same file name. It’s not perfect, some of the controls can be confusing, but in general it’s excellent programming.
Ubook does read some pdf files. Most noteably the free offerings tor books gave out awhile back. Ubook seems to have trouble with the ” rendering it as z. And whenever there’s a fi rendering it as ” but otherwise no problems. Its readable. Then there are pdfs that wont render at all, which is why I bought foxit. As for finding out which files will read I try to open them up from within ubook. I’m running a pdf book right now from a zip file. Reiffens Choice by Butler(one of Tors). Foxit renders perfectly but its not a good book reader like ubook is.
I’m also using version ubook 2008d on windows mobile 6.1 on an htc advantage. As far as I know with the pdfs its hit or miss. There’s no special tricks. A government info pdf didnt work, and a business-tech info pdf did work for me. All the Tors worked and I wish Tor would offer more ebooks at the Baen book site or start a drm free ebook site of their own