Open Knowledge - Where do they find these people?

Do you read books on a PDA yet? If you get one with a reasonably high-quality display, there's no contest between dead trees and the PDA. I highly recommend my Palm Tungsten E (<$200US with 128ppi and good contrast) and eReader software. Books, as I've mentioned before, can be found on IRC, and converted easily to the Palm's "doc" format.

However, as this practice becomes more widely-used, book publishers are going to recoil in the same manner as the RIAA and MPAA have. Gorman's opinion is going to take on the force of law, and once again, only those of us willing to risk breaking the law will be able to enjoy the increase in quality-of-life that the Internet can really bring.

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I use my Treo to read books but the small page size requires constant flicking of the scroll button. Continuous scrolling is too blurry. I only use it when I'm stuck somewhere with nothing else to read.
I need a bigger screen so at least 300 words appear at once. This still has to be as light as a small paperback and easy to hold and scroll with one hand. I don't think this exists yet.

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Ebook user interface is very personal. You really have to find the right combination that "just fits," and after that, it's all over for dead trees.

If you have the Treo 600, you've got the low-res (160x160) screen, which results in blocky text, and yes, blurry scrolling. I put up with that for a while on my Treo 90, as I don't usually read fast enough for it to get blurry. At any rate, newer models have better displays that fix those problems.

As for needing 300 words on the screen, that's just going to suck for you for a while. You can do it with my new Tungsten, but the text is too tiny to be comfortable over long periods. Good luck.

(BTW, I've turned to collecting first editions as a way to get the binding-glue smell and the feel of smooth paper that goes along with being a crazy book fan.)

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Plucker makes converting text to Palm format even easier. The Plucker Desktop for Windows even adds a context menu for converting supported file types directly into the Plucker supported Palm format, and the compression is better than a regular Palm Reader Palm Doc.

I've read a number of books on my T2 and my Palm IIIxe before it. Hell, I was avoiding Harry Potter until I stumbled across it and read it on my old WinCE device,a nd ended up buying the full books later.

And the Plucker software makes it really easy to grab web sites (links and all) for your Palm Pilot. Project Gutenberg and the Sacred Texts Archive are both good sources of material.

I've tried all of the ebook readers I could find, and concluded that Plucker was my favorite, and there are so many compatible distiller projects out there it's funny. (Just search sourceforge.net for "plucker")

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I like Plucker, but never made it my habit because it doesn't even support the standard Palm doc format. I know about the advantages of gzip, but it also makes it harder to share books with other PDA users. I've also fallen in love with eReader's ability to display white text on a black background, which is much easier on the eyes when reading in bed or other dark settings.

I'm starting a new book; I may give Plucker another shot and see if it holds my attention any longer this time.

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Sharing docs with others was never really one of the features I considered. I suppose I would have just beamed the Plucker Reader to them as well as the document if it had ever come up. Most of that I found that I wanted to read was in HTML or text format already, so the Palm Doc format wasn't really an issue for me.

Aside form that, Plucker became my replacement for Avantgo. I didn't really need Avantgo's ability to fill out forms and submit them at the next hotsync, and for everything outside of that Plucker seems better than Avantgo.

Mind you, all this will change in a couple years when I replace my Palm with something completely different. (I'll never buy another Palm Pilot again. Long story, but the thumbnail version is their pathetic and laughable attempts at customer service, crummy hardware, frequent resets and the whole "No SDIO Wireless Card for most models" fiasco.)

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I thought the comments on that page were highly amusing. :-)

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