[derekaustralia]

Hey

Great Forum, Just bought the asus eee 701 at Jb Hi Fi for $250. took it home and and was skeptical , looked a bit rugged and plasticy after looking at all the titanium xp machines in store. and battery time of 2.8 hours Geez

Loaded up linux desktop which takes seconds and loaded one of my ebooks into adobe through a usb flashdrive. It sucked. Reading text is way too small on full screen and when you zoom in on the page it keeps original format so you have to slowly scroll down while reading till you reach bottom of page. hmmmm only then can you flip on to the next page. id give it 5 minutes b4 you d be throwing the thing out the window.

Went on line and I see some of the Asus eee books are shipping with ebook software fbreader It apparently is in the internet section of the desktop. Discovered like many people that I did nt have the said icon in my internet desktop. But looking through the master directory and FBReader, its There!

So I decided Id try a few ebooks through fb reader.It reads html txt and fb2 files well, but doesnt understand some punctuation in rtf files. Its also a bummer it doesn t read pdf and lit files which 90% of my files are. So I converted some books using abc amber lit converter and book designer 4 was also good. the end result on fb reader is excellent. You can designate key presses for absolutely everything text size background/font colour so a dull grey background is nice to read black text off .eyestrain is at a minimum. And when you increase the size of the reading font it re formats the text so no more side scrolling at a snails pace inbetween page flips. It is a present for my wife who at the moment is literally chewing her way through vampire novels steph meyer etc.

two reasons I bought it. I have to be serious about deforestation of our planet and (ok I know enough already)and also I dont like the whole control thing IE.- the Kindle or the Swindle I like to call it and the the Sony DRM thing. It sucks.What annoys me already is the computer architecture in these ebook readers is so antiquated. Hello ZX81 Black and white screens. No pictures or b/w pictures if your e lucky. tiny memorys and all at an extortionate price.And you are totally at their(the companies) mercy. So until someone like apple decide to push the boundarys with something like they did for music with the Ipod, I will stick with the Asus eee. Its a great machine. Ive ordered an extra 5 hour battery and a car charger for it. it is purely gonna be for ebooks.Theres not much here in Australia ebookreader wise apart from DA Direct, and their stuff is too expensive E ink or No E ink.If I buy on ebay im stuffed because if problems occur shipping returns will burn a nice hole in my pocket. From what I ve seen it is a good sensible choice

One last thing At the moment as said earlier the best way to access FBreader is to save as favourite and load from file manager favourites.

I decided in my wisdom to try and install an Icon on my desktop for fbreader but in the end taking somebodys advice online I lost the whole desktop and got a nice black screen for my efforts.Niccee! Not to worry I reset the machine to restore factory settings and Im back to normal again Has anybody else added the icon onto their 701 desktop?. Also the settings on fbreader dont seem to be saving so I have to redo settings everytime. Its a brand new machine. Im sure some kind soul will help. If I do get any info from Asus I will share on this post

Cheers

Derek in the Sun >O< Its 28 outside, gotta go and catch some....later

P.S Hopefully the library on the wall will begin to shrink now Whew!! A close call