Well my V3 just arrived today. I will test it out for a couple of days and read a book or too and then post :-)
Okay had it for a week and very happy with it. I have found:
- the screen to be excellent with quick updates between pages.
- the design is elegant, slim, and easy to use.
- the default font is nice.
- the zoom feature (where it swaps the view from portrait to landscape) is very handy.
- firmware upgrade was simple and worked with my 1GB SD card.
- I might need to recharge the battery in a month.
Downside:
- you can't change the default font or font size.
- I use Linux so the the Hanlin Printer Driver (for producing WOL files) can't be used.
Having said that, I have read a Gutenberg TXT, a Sci-Fi HTML, and a Jane Austen PDF on it. Also played a bit with RTF and DOC.
As with any reader, the viewing depends on the original TXT / HTML / PDF / DOC / RTF file format. It can take a little playing to change the format to read well on the screen of the V3 if the original file isn't up to scratch. But I have found this to be quite simple on most occasions.
1) PDFs get shrunk to fit on the screen. So provided your A4 page PDF hasn't got more than the usual 25-30 lines / page you should be fine. The zoom feature comes into its own on PDFs - you can view the PDF in landscape and view half the page at a time.
2) HTML just seems to work.
3) RTF and DOC work well - just make sure you don't have more than 25-30 lines per page or the font tends to be too small to read easily.
3) Gutenberg TXT files needed to be reformatted because they put a Carriage Return (CR) at the end of every line, not just paragraphs. Turned out to be very simple to do in OpenOffice Writer.
OpenOffice Writer 2.3 - removing Carriage Returns from Gutenberg Text files.
- Open OpenOffice Writer
- Start with a new document
- File -> New -> Text Document
- Insert -> File -> choose your Gutenberg txt file
- Use the default ASCII filter options
- Highlight the whole document
- Format -> AutoFormat -> Apply
- Save document as a text file
- File -> Save As -> choose TXT(.txt) format and a name and save.
Your new text file is good for the V3 (and other eReaders I suspect).
