Quote:
Originally Posted by MachinegunDojo
I am not sure about the Palm Pilots, I know they wouldn't have the ePaper screen but perhaps they can serve the function as well?
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I use a Palm OS PDA as an ebook reader.
In my case, it's a Tapwave Zodiac 2, which is a Palm OS 5.26 device with a 320x480 screen and "virtual" data input area. Ebooks are stored on my SD cards.
Most of my electronic library is in Plucker format. Plucker is a free, open source offline HTML viewer for Palm devices. I get HTML content from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere, and convert to Plucker on my desktop. Plucker handles text attributes, fonts (on Palm OS 5 devices), color, embedded images, and hyperlinks. I have the complete Baen Free Library offerings in Plucker format, all of the Linux HOW-TOs, and a large number of other books on a wide variety of topics. All told, about 3,200 volumes, occupying about 1.5GB of a 2GB card.
To cover other bases, I also have the freeware version of eReader, the freeware MobiPocket Reader for PalmOS, PalmPDF, a superb free and open source PDF viewer for Palm devices, and PalmFiction, a free, open source viewer from a Russian programmer that handles Palm doc files, zTXT files, ASCII text files, Zipped text files, and RTF and Word documents (which it renders as plain text.)
I can read pretty much anything on the Zodiac, though I get PDFs only if no other format exists. Most PDFs don't reflow well, and reading them on a PDA screen leaves a bit to be desired.
I use a PDA for ebooks because I need to do other things as well, and the PDA is Personal Information Manager, MP3 player, photo viewer, video player, games device, and pocket reference to everything as well as ebook viewer.
I wouldn't mind a larger screen, but a device that can do everything I do with the PDA and had a larger screen would also carry a much larger price tag.
If you don't mind poking around on places like eBay, a Palm OS unit might be a good choice in your price range.
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Dennis