Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
I currently read ebooks using TealDoc on a Palm T3. I have a large (3000+) collection of ebooks in text and PDB format.
Looking at the various ebook readers on the market, they all seem to use the same screen, so the choice comes down to extra features and the best interface.
I'm not in the US, so the wireless feature of the Kindle is worthless to me.
What I'm looking to be able to do it dump my entire collection to a large memory stick and carry it around at all times. Could someone advise how well the interfaces for the various ebook readers would cope with navigating such a large collection of books? With the Palm I can organise things by directory exactly as I wish, which is ideal.
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I use a Palm OS device as well -- a Tapwave Zodiac 2. It has a 320x480 screen, 128MB of RAM, an ATI graphics chip with 2D acceleration, Yamaha stereo sound, Bluetooth, and two SD slots. One slot is SDIO and I can use wifi through a wifi SD card, but I generally don't.
I have about 3,500 ebooks on the device. The majority (about 3,200) are HTML files from Project Gutenberg, the Baen Free Library, and elsewhere, converted for use with
Plucker, a free, open source offline HTML reader for Palm OS. I roll my own conversions because I want color image support. Plucker supports hyperlinks, embedded images, color, and (on OS5) custom fonts. I use the high compression option that uses a Palm port of zlib to provide gzip compatible compression. The Plucker files occupy about 1.5GB of a 2GB SD card.
I also have a number of files in
Mobipocket format, created by posters here, as well as files in
eReader, PDF, Palm DOC, zTxt, RTF, and ASCII text format.
PDFs I handle with the free, open source,
PalmPDF application. For PalmDOC, zTxt (similar to PalmDOC, but using zlib for higher compression, plain ASCII text, and RTF files, I use a free, open source Palm viewer called
PalmFiction.
The Zodiac has two SD slots, and I have a 2GB card in each. Plucker files live on the first card in the /Palm/Programs/Plucker directory. Mobipocket files live in /Palm/Ebooks and PDF files live in /PDFs on the second card. Other formats mostly live in /Documents on the second card.
I use categories in Plucker, and Readling Lists in Mobipocket to classify things, as those programs don't support navigating the folder structure on the card. Plucker looks for documents in /Palm/Launcher, /Palm/Ebooks, and /Palm/Programs/Plucker. Mobi looks in /Palm/eBooks. eReader looks in /Palm/Launcher and /Palm/Books. PalmPDF and PalmFiction can navigate the card, so documents for them can be placed where I desire, and I use sub-directories for classification.
Having to maintain five viewers to cover all the bases, and recall what books are in what format is a PITA, but until everyone decides to support a standard ebook format I'm stuck with it. Meanwhile, it works well.
I need color and the ability to do other things on the device besides view ebooks, so I'm not currently in the market for a dedicated reader.
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Dennis