[bobcdy]

After rooting my Nook ST, I've investigated the various reader apps available because primarily I'll use it for reading epubs and mobie/prc ebooks. The apps I found and tried are: Aldiko, FBReader, Cool Reader, Moon+, and the native Nook reader that I think is ADRM. I tried reading two of my historical books in geology that have been uploaded to MR. They include fairly complex formatting. I included two mobi novels to check on how well the readers do them; unfortunately I have no complexly formatted mobi files. I was interested only in formatting accuracy compared to the original epubs. Many of the readers have extra features such as day/night settings but I did not consider these features.

The best two for epubs were the Nook native reader and Aldiko; Aldiko did a bit better in that ADRM gave overprints of large images (not in separate xhtml files) onto the succeeding page, whereas Aldiko did not, although the images were a bit smaller than they should have been. Both did tables well although ADRM was more consistent. Unfortunately Nook's ADRM does not allow listing books by folders whereas Aldiko does; I loaded many folders with numerous epubs onto the sd card. The books were recognized as being in my Nook library but the result when viewing my library was a stream of books all joined together in a continuous series with no hint of the folder structure. Books can be organized by 'collections'. I haven't tried this, but looking at the procedure required indicates this is no substitute for folders/subfolders. On my BeBook One, I have numerous author folders author, often with 5-10 books/folder. It would be enormously time consuming to use a collections method because each book needs to added to the various defined collections as far as I can determine.

Aldiko was really a great ereader - a shame it does not do Mobi also.

FBReader was not suitable for my ebooks because of its lack of css recognition - no italics, smallcaps, large or small normal case text, etc.; hang-indent paragraphs were not recognized. It probably is ok for simple formatted epubs. With its own formatting FBR does Mobi/prc and really simple epubs pretty well, but css italics, etc. are not shown. I have found I use it most for reading mobi/prc novels because I can set formatting to some extent, thus having paragraphs set off by larger spacing than the paragraph interlines; also handles very well folders/subfolders on sd card. Only two fonts - serif and sans serif are available, but several different sizes of each are possible. I also have a few fb2 mystery novels from 2008 and it's the only way I know to read these files.

Cool Reader and Moon+ were not suitable for my epubs - Cool Reader would not even recognize my hot links, although it recognized italics and smallcaps. Hang-indent paragraphs were not recognized and the right side of h-i paragraph texts ran off page. It does Mobi pretty well. It probably is ok for simply formatted epubs such as the typical fiction novel.

Moon+ gave italics for everything and did not recognized smallcaps, hang-indent paragraphs, and images were very small.

I tried the Kobo and Kindle apps and found they were closely tied to books purchased from the companies. I created a Kindle directory on the sd card and pasted a mobi file into it; the Kindle app read the mobi ebook very nicely. I could select a book to read from the Kindle folder but not from subfolders so all your mobi ebooks must be in the same folder regardless of author. There are 5 different font sizes that can be chosen, but there is no font face change option. In later reading with Kindle, I encounter an odd problem - all my kindle folder mobi files disappeared and I was left only with the mbp files. I think this may have happened when I was using adb wireless to enable a different keyboard, but I'm not at all sure.

I never could figure out how to read my epub books that I add to the Nook sd card using Kobo.