Quote:
Originally Posted by cozworth
I am considering a Palm TX. Palm looks like they are going to be around in the coming years and the screen size is fairly decent. I have a Treo 650 phone but the screen is so tiny I would never seriously think of reading a book on it...anyone have any suggestions about the device or the Digital Content compatibility with other devices that are currently available? The screen size is important to me. That is why I went with the Sony (that and it said I could use it the PDF's) but I have considered the Palm Tx in the last few days because of the problems...the upside of the Palm is that it has backlighting...
I am in love with the idea of carrying 50 or 100+ books in my pocket but this format issue is really making me crazy. I refused to use an MP3 player until Ipod came along. Now I don't know what I would do without it...too bad they don't make an ereader!
I want to make the same leap with books but I am realizing that I could really use some advice...I don't want to make another $300 mistake.
Thanks for your help!
Cozworth (Dawn)
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The Palm TX is an appropriate choice. What you have to watch for is ebook format.
I read ebooks on a Tapwave Zodiac 2. The Zodiac is a Palm OS device with a 320x480 color screen and 128MB of memory. It has two SD card slots, can take 2GB cards "stock", and with the addition of a FAT32 driver, can take 4GB cards. I have about 3,000 ebooks on a card in my device.
The TX is comparable, with only a single SD slot, but it can take 4GB cards "out of the box". It also builds in Wifi, and uses NVFS for storage, so data is retained if you lose power. (Older Palm devices stored data and programs in RAM, and if the battery ran down completely, you lost everything that wasn't stored on a card.)
The issue is ebook format. There are several ebook formats in use on Palm devices, each with their own associated reader. I prefer to get content in HTML format from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere, and convert for Plucker, a free, open source offline HTML viewer for PalmOS. Titles are also offered in "Peanut Press" format from eReader.com, with a freeware reader for them, and MobiPocket format, with a freeware reader. Some folks also use iSilo, a shareware HTML viewer, and TomeRaider, an ebook viewer that handles really
large files (Wikipedia is available for it). There are also a couple of different formats for plain text files, including Palm "doc" files, zTXT files, and plain text files stored on a card. And it's
possible to read PDF files on a Plm device, but not recommended unless there isn't another choice. PDFs aren't formatted for the small screen, and reading them is problematic.
In addition, you have the issue of Digital Rights Management, and protected ebooks that require a key. eReader and Mobipocket both offer DRM'd books, but with different protection models. MobiPocket's is about the best compromise assuming you have to deal with DRM: you can install DRM'd MobiPocket ebooks on up to five devices, sou you could read them on laptop and PDA.
Bottom line, the TX is an appropriate device to use, the screen is adequate, and you can have enough capacity to carry a
lot of ebooks. But you won't be able to read the DRM's PDFs you already have.
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Dennis