Um, Doctorow, in what world are e-readers and PDF viewers expected to be the same?
Do any of the e-readers listed here in the MobileRead forums read reflowable e-text formats
and PDF? The requirements are so different — basically you need two rendering engines.
(This isn't to say that we won't see a couple such bi-format e-readers this year.)
At any rate, FBReader displays html and plain text formats better than other e-readers I've seen, as well as Plucker pdb, Aportis doc, Weasel zTxt, and TCR (psion text). I'm hopeful that additional formats will be added too (not any proprietary ones, though). Since I read only part of my texts in FB2 format in FBReader, I don't consider the fact that that's the native format of the program to be a detriment.
Actually, since FB2 is an XML-format not directly based on XHTML (
that's different), converting other formats to it and converting to other formats from it works really well. There are a lot of tools to do this. I found most of them on the software page at fictionbook.org (which is down right at the moment). Other locations with tools are at
www.fictionbook.org/index.php/Eng:Converters ,
www.gribuser.ru/xml/fictionbook/index.html.en and
haali.cs.msu.ru/pocketpc/scripts.html
Another thing that makes FBReader a good choice for OLPC is that it automatically detects a great many encodings: utf-8, us-ascii, windows-1251, windows-1252, koi8-r, ibm866, iso-8859-*, Big5, GBK. And it has built-in hyphenation algorithms for English, Esperanto, French, German and Russian.
The release for FBReader desktop is new with this version; your feedback will clearly help identify the problems there. I know from experience that Misha and Nikolay are responsive to bug reports.
Plus, there's something I keep forgetting — this is still a pre-1.0 release. There's more to come, and bug-removal is part of that.
