8+ Readers in comparison

[emellaich]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

...
When owning only 1 device, 45 seconds for startup aren't that big a problem. But if you compare readers, it's a bit annoying.

I guess its all in your personal habits. 45 seconds (or more, it seemed like an eternity) was too long for me. I had 500 books on my Cybook and I believed iut got longer as you added more books. I'd want to pick up the reader and read a few pages and put it down. By the time my Cybook loaded up it might have been time for me to put the book back down. My current reader is relatively instant-on. This instant availability is what I expected from reading paperback books.

[junkyardwillie]

I agree, my Iliad has become my sole eReader device because it handes PDFs so well but when I first got it I hardly used it for the first month because I was so used to just picking up my Sony 500 and turning it on automatically. The boot time just killed it for me. Now I find ways around it like starting it up and going to grab some reading snacks or if I'm heading to the train turning it on while I'm walking over so its ready to go when I'm in the train. The boot time is annoying but you find ways around it and the Iliad still seems to be the most versatile of the smaller ebook readers, my DR1000S hasn't come in yet so the jury is out on that one right now.

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by junkyardwillie

I agree, my Iliad has become my sole eReader device because it handes PDFs so well but when I first got it I hardly used it for the first month because I was so used to just picking up my Sony 500 and turning it on automatically. The boot time just killed it for me. Now I find ways around it like starting it up and going to grab some reading snacks or if I'm heading to the train turning it on while I'm walking over so its ready to go when I'm in the train. The boot time is annoying but you find ways around it and the Iliad still seems to be the most versatile of the smaller ebook readers, my DR1000S hasn't come in yet so the jury is out on that one right now.

DR 1000S starts a bit faster than iLiad. Still slower than Sony 505, though. I'll take the time measurements asap and add it to the others.
Anyway, iRex' table functionality by far is unrivaled. And the huuuuge screen: Always a looker. Goooood choice!

[Jill74]

Originally Posted by Lilly

Oh my goodness! I'm waiting to add a 8.9 or 10.7 reader later this year or early next year (probably depends on if Sony come out with one this year or I will wait for Plastic Logic's). That will make 3 and it's work enough juggling the 2 I have now, so wow!

Good luck with that. You can do it.

[cze]

Dear mgmueller,

thanks alot for the wealth of information you provided for me. I have now bought myself an Iliad and am very happy with it. As I of course have practically no experience with all the things that are possible now, maybe you can point me some bits still further?

I went for the one with wifi capabilities. I plan to use this to read e.g. entries of online encyclopedias and recent book reviews published online. It seems I will be able to do this with dillo together with wpafix and connection-scripts, but it's not yet really convenient. So I wonder if it would be better to first download a website on my desktop pc and then put things together e.g. as chm-files, e.g. with plucker.
Do you have any experience with this?
How do you transfer your files to your Iliad? (Via iRex Tool, USB, Samba, ftp, CF-Reader or ...?)

Btw, I already had to reflash the thing because after installation of some third party applications (dropbear, i assume, but cannot retrace it until now) it kept rebooting.

Now if you allow: what I would be really interested in is how you did setup your Iliad. Which third party tools did you install where? If you would find the time to write something like another helpful user did in this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29060 (maybe in that thread and not here?), i would be even more grateful! Especially I wonder how you manage arranging your around 800 books on your iliad! And you mentioned your use of an external harddrive. Here I am wondering if there are 2,5" usb cases that do not need an external power supply with the Iliad. Do you know this?

Thank you, again, very much!

[junkyardwillie]

Originally Posted by cze

Dear mgmueller,

thanks alot for the wealth of information you provided for me. I have now bought myself an Iliad and am very happy with it. As I of course have practically no experience with all the things that are possible now, maybe you can point me some bits still further?

I went for the one with wifi capabilities. I plan to use this to read e.g. entries of online encyclopedias and recent book reviews published online. It seems I will be able to do this with dillo together with wpafix and connection-scripts, but it's not yet really convenient. So I wonder if it would be better to first download a website on my desktop pc and then put things together e.g. as chm-files, e.g. with plucker.
Do you have any experience with this?
How do you transfer your files to your Iliad? (Via iRex Tool, USB, Samba, ftp, CF-Reader or ...?)

Btw, I already had to reflash the thing because after installation of some third party applications (dropbear, i assume, but cannot retrace it until now) it kept rebooting.

Now if you allow: what I would be really interested in is how you did setup your Iliad. Which third party tools did you install where? If you would find the time to write something like another helpful user did in this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29060 (maybe in that thread and not here?), i would be even more grateful! Especially I wonder how you manage arranging your around 800 books on your iliad! And you mentioned your use of an external harddrive. Here I am wondering if there are 2,5" usb cases that do not need an external power supply with the Iliad. Do you know this?

Thank you, again, very much!

I never bothered with putting the dillo browser on my Iliad, it was something that I wanted to do but since I'm hardly ever able to find a free wifi signal it didn't make a lot of sense for me. I usually either copy the text for any website that I want to read or create a PDF and drop it on my MMC card.

All of my organizing is done through folders, its nice that in the Iliad you can do folders within folders I'm not sure how many files I have on there because so much is buried in folders but its probably about 200 files (I tend to just drop stuff on there that I want to read and then leave it on there until I get time to). You should check out https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49343, there is a website called Readability that reformats websites into text which is cool for a quick PDF for my Iliad. Folders are really the way to go to organize for instance within books I have Fiction, Non Fiction, Corporate Finance, Biographies and a Misc folder, Within Corp Finance I have Investments, Economics and Valuation. So it helps to keep from having one folder with too many files, I try to keep my folders to have less than 20 files. I wish you could reroute the buttons at the bottom because I use Mobipocket for all of my RSS feeds (which works great BTW) but it sends things to an ebooks folder so I can't get to it using the buttons on the bottom, I have to search the MMC card which involves a few extra steps. MobiPocket is probably what I use the most for non-ebooks because it pulls and formats RSS feeds so well (you can use the TOC to jump to various articles and if you hit the little "Back" button at the bottom of the screen the Iliad will take you back to the table of contents rather than the previous page you flipped, pretty cool)

In terms of programs there are a ton of them out there if you search through the Iliad forum. I didn't want to load a bunch of them because I had a fear it might start to crash if programs conflicted and there were only a few programs that I really needed on my Iliad, the others seemed like it might be fun to play around with for a little bit but I had no long term interest in. The three that I use are the FBreader (I still can't figure out how to load the 10.7 I still have the 9.something, it works well enough so I don't care), the "Improved Contentlister" (awesome one that allows you to show up to 20 I think items at a time on the screen, I think I use 12 because I think that one looks the best in terms of size of the document title and number of items you can see), and last but certainly not least I use the "Multi Ipdf Installer for 2.12" the one I use within the program is the Rincewise gestures (includes fullscreen). The fullscreen mode is great and I love the gesture to be able to erase by just holding down on the screen rather than needing to switch through that bottom menu, it makes my Sudoku games more fun.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35374

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...=multiple+ipdf

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by cze

Dear mgmueller,

thanks alot for the wealth of information you provided for me. I have now bought myself an Iliad and am very happy with it. As I of course have practically no experience with all the things that are possible now, maybe you can point me some bits still further?

How do you transfer your files to your Iliad? (Via iRex Tool, USB, Samba, ftp, CF-Reader or ...?)

Btw, I already had to reflash the thing because after installation of some third party applications (dropbear, i assume, but cannot retrace it until now) it kept rebooting.

Now if you allow: what I would be really interested in is how you did setup your Iliad. Which third party tools did you install where? If you would find the time to write something like another helpful user did in this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29060 (maybe in that thread and not here?), i would be even more grateful! Especially I wonder how you manage arranging your around 800 books on your iliad! And you mentioned your use of an external harddrive. Here I am wondering if there are 2,5" usb cases that do not need an external power supply with the Iliad. Do you know this?

Thank you, again, very much!

Dear cze,

congratulations, excellent choice. As you can see, iRex iLiad clearly makes my top 3, in some instances it ranks sole #1 (PDF zooming being one of these).
On my first iLiad (which has been stolen after 1 year) I've tested more or less all applications, which have been available back then (summer 2007). Honestly, on my replacement unit, I didn't even bother.
All of the applications have been working. But I simply didn't find them necessary.
I don't use FBReader, as it's easy enough, to convert all my books to "standard" formats. Either I purchase .prc, which I can view directly and perfectly on iLiad. Or I purchase .lrx, which can't be stripped from DRM anyway. Or I go for .epub and usually convert to .lrf and .mobi, so I can read them on all my other readers.
Browsing the web on eInk devices isn't my goal, I usually do it on my UMPC which I've always got with me.
The improved contentlister has some nice aspects. But I don't need it as well, organizing my files in folders works fine enough.
There are great additions to the Ipdf viewer. But even without these additions, I consider iLiad's PDF capabilities by far the best of all my readers. For example, I don't need fullscreen, when iLiad already has a far bigger display then Sony 505 or most of the other readers. And I love the simplicity and usability of the standard Ipdf application, wheres I find the additions less "handy".

I transfer all of my ebooks via CF-Reader. Then I copy the very same document structure to the SD card of my iRex 1000S. (My CF-Reader handles SD as well.)

Organizing the files is no problem at all.
My first hirarchical level is the source, where I've got the books from, i. e. mobipocket.com or fictionwise.com.
Very convenient: With "iLiad Manifest Creator" (JAVA), you can manipulate the folder. You can add a thumbnail or add comments.
Most of the times, I don't even need another hirarchical level of folders. I've got about 8 sources, so it's less than 100 books per folder.
For the bigger folders, my next hirarchical level is "genre".
It's far from perfect. With Sony's library software, for example I can use "collections". Meaning, the very same book can be in numerous collections.
I could have a collection for genre "Horror" and another collection for genre "Stephen King", all containing the very same books.
With iLiad it's a bit more complicated, as I sometimes by accident have the very same book physically from 2 different sources. If so, I delete the one from the less favorite source. Sometimes I struggle to remember, in which folder a specific book may be. But usually, I simply scroll through my folders until I find my next read(s). Once you've opened a book, it's easy to find it again. iLiad remembers your last reads.

Concerning the external harddrive: I've used "Transcend StoreJet OTG", no external power supply. I already had bought this harddisk, to copy my Photos on that harddisk (being USB host), without use of any PC - directly from my camera.

[cze]

Wow! Thank you - both of you - very much (again)!!! ipdf in continuous mode is really really great! Sorry if this gets too much off topic, but one more question please: do you know of any really working djvu reader for iLiad v2.12? I tried several - resulting in numerous brickings and needs of reflash (It seems to occur with older packages that try some way of "registry" modification.) Can you point me to the exact download link?

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by cze

Wow! Thank you - both of you - very much (again)!!! ipdf in continuous mode is really really great! Sorry if this gets too much off topic, but one more question please: do you know of any really working djvu reader for iLiad v2.12? I tried several - resulting in numerous brickings and needs of reflash (It seems to occur with older packages that try some way of "registry" modification.) Can you point me to the exact download link?

Sorry, don't know of any. Is it about comics? Or technical/legal documents? Anyway, ... I've only got a few which I've converted to .pdf....

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by cze

Dear mgmueller,

thanks alot for the wealth of information you provided for me. I have now bought myself an Iliad and am very happy with it. As I of course have practically no experience with all the things that are possible now, maybe you can point me some bits still further?

I went for the one with wifi capabilities. I plan to use this to read e.g. entries of online encyclopedias and recent book reviews published online. It seems I will be able to do this with dillo together with wpafix and connection-scripts, but it's not yet really convenient. So I wonder if it would be better to first download a website on my desktop pc and then put things together e.g. as chm-files, e.g. with plucker.
Do you have any experience with this?
How do you transfer your files to your Iliad? (Via iRex Tool, USB, Samba, ftp, CF-Reader or ...?)

Btw, I already had to reflash the thing because after installation of some third party applications (dropbear, i assume, but cannot retrace it until now) it kept rebooting.

Now if you allow: what I would be really interested in is how you did setup your Iliad. Which third party tools did you install where? If you would find the time to write something like another helpful user did in this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29060 (maybe in that thread and not here?), i would be even more grateful! Especially I wonder how you manage arranging your around 800 books on your iliad! And you mentioned your use of an external harddrive. Here I am wondering if there are 2,5" usb cases that do not need an external power supply with the Iliad. Do you know this?

Thank you, again, very much!

No 3rd party application and might be pretty obvious. Just to make sure: What I really can recommend, is playing Sudoku or Kakuro. Simply scribbling on PDFs. PDFs are easy to find for free. Or you can purchase from "Lulu Press", for example.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kacir

I also do not like mobi reader that is on Cybook that can not even display page number correctly.

No version of the Mobi Reader displays page numbers correctly - that's inherent in the Mobi "engine" which all the Mobi devices use. Because of the inherent "uselessness" of Mobi page numbers, I think personally that Bookeen made the correct choice in simply displaying a progress bar instead of inaccurate page numbers.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No version of the Mobi Reader displays page numbers correctly - that's inherent in the Mobi "engine" which all the Mobi devices use. Because of the inherent "uselessness" of Mobi page numbers, I think personally that Bookeen made the correct choice in simply displaying a progress bar instead of inaccurate page numbers.

Define "correctly". FBReader displays a really useful page number.

[HarryT]

But FBReader is not an "official" Mobi device; it does not support Mobi DRM.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But FBReader is not an "official" Mobi device; it does not support Mobi DRM.

Well Kindle does it differently. And I do not tink that companies are forbidden to change this even if they have licensed programs from MobiPocket.

[HarryT]

Many people dislike the Kindle's "section numbers" (which are a count of 128-byte units in the file). Just goes to show that no matter what you do, somebody's going to be unhappy. Personally, I'm happy with the progress bar; I know that you'd prefer numbers.