why ms reader sucks

[dMores]

well, actually it doesn't suck. i find it's the prettiest reader out there, and the documents can be formatted very nicely.

but ...

it's a proprietary format.
i recently switched from the pocket pc arena to the symbian swamps (as duncan call it). the only ebooks available for that platform is palm .pdb and mobipocket.
so, wise-crack daniel decided to convert most of his books to .pdb so he can read on the p900.

then i won that pocket pc on pocketpcthoughts.com. naturally, i deleted most of my .lit files so i wouldn't get lost when looking in the "my ebooks" folder of my hard drive.
(sub-folders. no why didn't i think of that?)

naturally, during the conversion all of the pretty formatting was gone.
if i had bought the books in .pdb in the first place, i'd still have nice books.
no
one
word
lines, no page numbers 27 in the middle of 28 sentences etc.

so, either we get ms reader on symbian, palm etc, or we just stick to a format that's cross-platform compatible. and make prettier .pdb readers !

why i write this message, i don#t know. just want to inform people that if they ever decide to switch platforms, there will be a lot of converting and porting going on.

[Janak Parekh]

Agreed. The lack of adoption of a standard ebook format is one of the major hindrances to commercial ebook success. :(

--janak

[cawinters]

yea it seems liek you pay hardcover prices for what is essentially a disposable book I won't have access to in 5 years. :!:

[Jorgen]

I agree with all of the above. I hate that MS Reader is slow and not really functional, but the books look really good! And we will never get a MS Reader for Palm.

Having to convert is one thing, but if the ebooks are protected by a DRM sceme, you cannot convert and will not be able to read your ebooks. And, yes, looking at the long row of PDA's I have had over the years, I can see myself standing with a PDA that cannot read anything other than standard Palm PDB. So, ebooks should really be bought as HTML or ASCII text or something that easily (and legally) can be converted to these formats.

Jorgen

[dMores]

since my ebook craze was actually nurtured by the urge to catch up on "must-have-read" works that i have missed, i got a lot of my ebooks from places like the gutenberg project. i usually downloaded royalty free .txt or .pdf files and converted them with the .lit exporter for word.

then i chucked those .txt files away, and had to convert my already converted .lit files to .pdb. again, chucked the .lit files.

now, convert back to .lit.
no thanks, i'll stick with .pdb.

the ones i bought i usually read after downloading, so they remained in the .lit format i bought them in. i just wanted to have a huge library of to-read books on my pda, hence the conversion marathon :)

i can recommend the "palm ebook studio" program, both for windows and mac. i haven't tried it myself, but it looks like a word processor for ebooks. so, you can copy and paste text from one program to the other. i'd get ms reader for desktop, copy the text and paste it into ebook studio, and render a .pdb file.
(it's on my wishlist, i'll write a "review" of some sort and post it here, if anyone wants to know. it's also a good program for authors who want to publish in .pdb format. inplement gfx etc.).

not sure how that works with drm protected files, though.

[Jorgen]

>urge to catch up on "must-have-read" works

So am I.

I convert Gutenberg files from "paragraph separated by empty line" to "paragraph as one long line" with a homemade program and then to isilo-format (very hard compression), standard PDB or .LIT depending on the target PDA.

Another good place to pick classic ebooks is www.blackmask.com - you can get them in a variety of formats.

Jorgen