Thread: Favourite e-reader and why?
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Old 11-19-2009, 11:49 AM   #21
DMcCunney
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Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Tingle View Post
I can turn the backlight up to 11 and read for a very short time in bright sunlight. That way lies madness. I bought a jetBook for that, instead.
What I use is a Tapwave Zodiac 2, which is a PDA running Palm OS 5.26. Tapwave went belly up in 2005, but I have several so can deal with hardware failure.

The Zodiac was intended to be a combo PDA and handheld gaming device, so it has a 320x480 color screen driven by an ATI graphics chip with 8MB of onboard RAM and 2D acceleration, Yamaha stereo sound with actual (tiny) stereo speakers on the device, Bluetooth, and 128MB of RAM. The best feature from my perspective is two SD card slots, one of which is SDIO. I have a 2GB SD card in each, but can upgrade to 4GB (non-SDHC) if need be.

About half of the Zodiac's purpose in life it to be an ebook reader, and I have about 3,500 volumes on the device. About 3,200 are HTML converted to the format used by Plucker, an open source offline HTML reader for Palm OS devices. Among other things, I have the complete Baen Free Library converted for Plucker. But I also have several hundred Mobipocket volumes, mostly courtesy of the fine folks at MR, and some stuff in eReader format, as well as PDF files I view with the open source PalmPDF application. I can handle Palm Doc files, zTXT files, plain ASCII text files, and Word documents and RTF files via the open source PalmFiction application. (PF strips the formatting on the Word/RTF files and displays the text as plain text.)

It's handy because I can read just about anything on it. The problem is remembering which book is in which format, read by which viewer. Since I convert HTML to Plucker by preference, or get Mobipocket format, others are there because it was the only way to get them, so keeping tings straight isn't as bad as it might be.

I can also turn the backlight all the way off, which makes it readable out of doors.

The biggest wins for me are color support and the fact that I can do many other things besides view ebooks. I'd like a bigger screen, but can deal with what I have.
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Dennis
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