Good eBook Reader

[vibranze]

Guys,

Recently I'm struggling between Mobireader and Isilo just to read the same format of ebook. The problem is if I viewed from Mobireader I can only see junk but in Isilo I can see the content. Why they are different since the extension is the same pdb/prc?

Cheers,
Vibranze

[Nate the great]

Mobipocket Reader only reads Mobipocket ebooks. If you saw garbage, then that file is most likely not Mobipocket.

[wallcraft]

All PalmOS files are either .pdb or .prc, so the extension tells you nothing about the contents. See PDB in the wiki.

[HarryT]

A PDB or PRC file is just a "container file" - rather like a ZIP file. It can contain any type of data at all. MobiPocket books and iSilo books are not the same data format.

[vibranze]

Thanks guy for the answer. So what is the so called 'almost' perfect reader that can read 'almost' all the ebook format?

I found repligo is a very good reader, better than PDF instead but too bad the converter is not free

Cheers,
Vibranze

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by vibranze

Thanks guy for the answer. So what is the so called 'almost' perfect reader that can read 'almost' all the ebook format?

I found repligo is a very good reader, better than PDF instead but too bad the converter is not free

On Palm OS, there is no one perfect reader. This is not a limitation of Palm OS: it's inherent in the fact that there isn't one standard ebook format everyone supports.

As mentioned, PDB and PRC are containers. What they contain will be arbitrary. The only things that can be on RAM in a Palm device are files in Palm Database format. The first record in any Palm Database is a header that contains information about the database. In particular, it contains a Creator ID that specifies what uses the data. Data files on a Palm device will have the same Creator ID as the application that uses them, which is how Palm OS keeps track of what data is displayed by what program. A Palm application will only "see" the data it knows how to handle.

I use a Tapwave Zodiac 2 as an ebook reader. The Zodiac is a Palm OS 5 device with a 320x480 color screen, 128MB of RAM, and two SD card slots. I currently maintain five viewer programs to cover all the bases.

Most of my ebook library (about 3,200 volumes) is HTML converted for the Plucker offline HTML viewer for Palm OS. I also have several hundred volumes in Mobipocket format read with Mobipocket Reader, some PDF files displayed with PalmPDF, some files in PML format viewed with eReader, and some stuff in PalmDOC, zTXT, plain text, RTF, and Word format which I read with Palm Fiction. It's an annoyance to have to recall which content is in which format read by what viewer, but since there isn't a single viewer that handles all of those formats, and all of the content I want isn't available in the same format, I'm stuck with it. At least I largely can read everything.
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Dennis