[zafaran]

I discovered CoolReader on Google Play to put on my new Samsung Galaxy SII running Android 2.6.x, and liked it so much that 3 days ago (7 August 2012) I went searching for an apk that I could side-load onto my Kindle Fire since Google adamantly refuses to recognize that the Fire is an Android device. Even with a lot of digging, the closest I can guess-timate for Android version on the Fire is something like 3.x--maybe--I could be wildly wrong on that point since the information was really cryptic in the sysinfo. I used the Maxthon Browser to directly download the apk from SourceForge into the Fire, installed it, and had a clean install with no issues.

So far CoolReader is behaving quite nicely, and not being nearly as twitchy as the built-in Kindle reader app when I'm trying to read .mobi formatted files--and I am aware CR's converting it out of .mobi into .fb2(?) format for internal use. That's not an issue considering I'm still reading .mobi formatted files on my Blackberry Torch 9810 with BB OS7 with the old, old, old MobiPocket Reader for Blackberry that hasn't had an update since before Amazon bought MobiPocket. It has no *clue* about multi-tasking, but it still reads the books very, very well.

Actual useability is one issue in my search for an alternate reader for the Fire. The other issue is/was the fact that I've been creating .mobi formatted books for almost 15 years and I've got about 4,000 of them in my current Calibre library, and I tend to keep a subset of about 1,500 of them on any of my devices at any given time. Even working for the last year with updating metadata in the older books when I have a chance and generating an .epub as an intermediate step to a new .mobi formatted file with the updated metadata still leaves a *lot* of books that are still .mobi only. The using .epub as an intermediate step is so I can use Sigil to tweak books originally generated with the really old MobiCreator Personal version from about 13 years ago since I don't like some of the formatting artifacts it left in the files. And .epub's been recommended by several experienced ebook designers as format of choice for making the original ebooks and/or conversions and then converting to other formats of various types that aren't as capable of as complex formatting as the .epub format is.

So far, CoolReader's handled anything I've thrown at it including an externally mounted 32 gig microSD card on the Galaxy with no problems, so bountiful thanks to the designer.

Pat in North Carolina