11:13 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

EPublishing Blog has an article pointing to a beginner's guide to reading ebooks. If you're looking for some basic information about ebooks, this would be an article worth reading. It talks about the basics like ebook readers, where to get ebooks, DRM, etc. all in language suitable for a beginner.

10:28 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Woot! Woot! It's not just a cry of "yeah" anymore. In very short time, www.Woot.com has become an online sales phenomenon that has people watching for the daily geek item to go on sale at 1am Eastern time every day.

The site has been down this weekend, with just a message teasing about selling out for the money. But in fact they go on to say that it's just so they can put up the new Woot 2.0 site for this week. Cool!

If you haven't been to Woot yet, then be sure to take a look. I'm one of the early members (and was even sent a certificate in appreciation to honor my participation). Each weekday there is an item for sale. If you check the forums you can see what items were sold in the past, but it's everything from coffee makers to shavers to computers to Pocket PCs to remote control cars to all kinds of things. I've bought quite a few items there and have not (yet) been disappointed. But you have to get there and buy before they run out of stock. Some of the best deals on popular items can sell out very quickly.

So be sure to check out the new site when it comes back up tomorrow to get the full scoop. I'm pretty excited to see what the new version looks like. Maybe they'll even start selling more than one item each day?!

10:42 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

If you find Adobe Reader too utterly bloated, you may want to give the free Foxit PDF Reader a try. Even though its download size is less than 1Mb, it does everything you need from a basic lightweight PDF Reader (including search functionality).

10:28 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book Formats | Other formats

Want to create PalmDoc documents for eReader from text or MS Word documents?

There's an approach I tried recently that might just be exactly what you want if you have MS Word on a Windows PC... it's a utility available at the Publish eBook Website from Peter Gorod. (See the author's previous MobileRead post.) One of the advantages of this tool is that it is supposed to be able to carry over a lot of formatting.

The macro is based on the Word2PML macro, but Peter said he's not sure who wrote that so couldn't give proper credit. The utility is free, but is released as "charityware" which means that if you like it, you are asked to give something to a Catholic charity.

Here's the basic idea of how to get started.

1) You download the zip file from the website, and extract the contents into a directory. No "installation" is necessary. It includes a MS Word document with macros in it. It's been tested in MS Word 2002 (XP), but may work in other versions as well. It also includes the DropBook1.5.2.exe utility from the Motricity/eReader folks, which is the engine that makes it all work.

2) You open the following document in MS Word: Publish eBook.doc
Make sure that you have reduced the Word macro option to medium security, or it won't run. You don't start any programs. The system is VB scripts in the "Publish" document, so you run it by opening that Word document, which includes a page with some options to set and a "Publish eBook" button to get it started with a conversion.

That's all there is to it!
But a few things that I learned in my brief trial that you should keep in mind...

* Here's what it does behind the scenes. It grabs the text or HTML source file and converts it into a .pml (Palm Markup Language?) file that is what DropBook uses as input. That's created in the same directory as the source document. Then it launches DropBook to produce a PalmDoc document (in the same directory as the source file and the pml file.) If you choose the options, you can have it automatically delete the intermediate pml file, and automatically set it up in the installer to hotsync to your device on the next hotsync. I prefer to do that transfer with my card reader, though.

* Don't use any non-text characters in the title of the book. (You'll probably be prompted for a title if you start with a text file. But I think it grabs title and author metadata from Word documents automatically.) If you use something like a dash in the title, like I did, you'll get error messages.

* If you get far enough to get a .pml file, but can't finish the conversion to .pdb, you can always use DropBook manually. Nothing to it -- you just run it, point to the .pml file, and click on convert. It's so fast on my text full-length book that I wasn't sure if it even did anything!

* Check to make sure that the source document text flows properly. I originally had some problems with short lines on my pda screen, but this is not a problem special to this utility. If you have a paragraph mark at the end of every line, you will want to do something like the following to prepare the file.

Change every single occurance paragraph mark to a space, but keep the double paragraph marks to handle regular paragraph breaks. In MS Word:
1) Replace all ^p^p with <p> (or if that occurs in the document, use something unique instead)
2) Replace all ^p with a space
3) Replace all <p> with ^p^p
4) Save as a .txt file with Windows default char set and don't choose CR/LR option for each line.

You can test the results by opening in notepad and shrinking the width of the window. It should flow properly if the CR at the end of each line is gone.

This trick works for other document conversions, and may also be helpful if you just want to read a txt file from iSilo and want it to flow right.

If you run into trouble, there's even a forum where you can post issues.

If you try it, let us know what you think. All in all, I found it to be a very nice way to create PalmDoc documents. I hope Peter continues to support it as we move to Longhorn and future Office versions.

09:56 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Palm Addicts is reminding us that the Tanker Bob's very nice series on PalmOS vs Windows Mobile is now complete with part seven.

From The Duck. Tanker Bob has been a Palm aficionado for many years, and his seven part series is must reading for anyone wondering about the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms.

The articles are called
"Tales from the Dark Side, or is that the Light Side? An In-Depth Look at Making the Switch from Palm to Pocket PC"
and you can find them here...
Tanker Bob Part 1
Tanker Bob Part 2
Tanker Bob Part 3
Tanker Bob Part 4
Tanker Bob Part 5
Tanker Bob Part 6
Tanker Bob Part 7

09:44 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Just saw a nice thread started by Sammy over at the Palm Addicts Forums called Palm OS Your Views On The Future. Hop on over to take a look at some random thoughts from yours truly, and add some of your own.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the topic of whether or not PalmOS is dead, and whether PalmOS on Linux is too little too late, or even going to abandon support for traditional handhelds in favor of feature phones. I have to admit that I haven't read most of discussion or articles yet, but some of the places you might look in addition to all the forums...
* A podcast at 1src by Jeff Kirvin.
* A Pocket Factory article.
* One from Pocket PC Thoughts

And some of the original reporting about Patrick McVeigh's comments is here...
* A Vnunet report.
* A PalmInfoCenter report

07:05 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Sunrise

A minor maintenance release this time:

• Fixed: Deflate compression
  "deflate" compressed content was not always handled correctly.
• Updated: libraries
  HttpClient, NekoHTML and SWT libraries updated to their latest releases.

If you are new to Sunrise, click here to find out more about its top-notch features for website offline conversion.

06:58 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) is an open-source media player for Palm OS- and Windows Mobile-based devices. Version 0.66 was just released and the list of changes is truly impressive! To make it short: TCPMP is the only media player you'll ever need to install on your PDA! It includes video support for DivX, XviD, MP4, WMV, and audio support for MP3, AAC, Ogg, AC3 and much more.

Download link