Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Gee Mont
I tried the free Palm reader this week, installing it on my desktop and PPC. I used a multiformat ebook from Fictionwise to test the same title on both readers. I didn't like the way text was formatted on the Palm reader. Six to nine spaces for a tab indent! It made the text look like a jejune experiment in beat poetry, especially where there was a lot of dialogue. Free titles from Univ. of VA didn't indent at all, just skipped a line between paragraphs. Maybe this quirky text formatting doesn’t bug some people, but it bugged me. The supposedly better features, like theme settings didn't impress me. I didn't like the Palm reader. I was going to buy a title from Palm Media, just to try the DRM, but that text looked so bad on the titles I tried, I decided it wasn’t worth it. Maybe the version you pay for is better.
|
Palm Reader is only good for secure Palm ebooks, which have formatting. The multi-format Palm Doc files you tried are like plain text, but compressed. For some reason, both Palm Reader and Mobipocket are terrible with them, especially the indents. uBook is the best I've tried as it even converts underscores and asterisks to italics and bold text.
I doubt you'd like the secure Palm formatting if you're used to MS Reader. There are no margins, and paragraphs have no indents, just a line in between. I'm used to it, but I prefer using Mobipocket for multi-format ebooks. I buy secure Palm ebooks because the DRM is the safest in the long run (yes, I know MS Reader ebooks are actually the safest right now because they can be converted, but I'd prefer not to support such a flawed model) but the reader has a lot of opportunities for improvement. The reader can be upgraded, you're stuck with the DRM. I'm just hoping that PDM will add new features: optional margins, full screen, landscape, and support for other platforms such as Symbian.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by dh
Anyway, the DRM for MP is tied to the device by a serial number. Hard resetting changes the number. The only cure seems to be to go to the MP site, edit the number in your profile and downloading the book again. I had to do this a couple of times, before I figured out what what was causing me to have to hard reset, the last time MP told me I had reached my limit. WTF?
|
This happened to me too, which is why I'll never buy secure Mobipocket. I now have 59 secure Palm books, and I'd be very unhappy if I had to redownload all of them just to use on a new device.