oh ebooks, why do you hate me?

[nic]

And advice?

I have an hp ipaq 1945 (i think that is a 266mhz proc on that). Adobe Reader works well, except if I have a .pdf loaded from my storage card and turn my device off adobe reader locks up or give me a "read error" and locks up when I turn my device back on :(.

Next, Microsoft Reader has some cool features, but it is REALLY REALLY slow. It takes forever to open a standard length book, and doing simple things like managing my bookmarks is very painful in this program. Not very responsive and very frustrating. Placing the ebook in main memory vs. storage card has no affect on speed.

i have all the updates installed on my device (1.1 rom + newest sd driver).

Any help with speeding MS reader up or preventing adobe from crashing?

Thanks!
-nic

[chrisah]

And advice?

I have an hp ipaq 1945 (i think that is a 266mhz proc on that). Adobe Reader works well, except if I have a .pdf loaded from my storage card and turn my device off adobe reader locks up or give me a "read error" and locks up when I turn my device back on :(.

Next, Microsoft Reader has some cool features, but it is REALLY REALLY slow. It takes forever to open a standard length book, and doing simple things like managing my bookmarks is very painful in this program. Not very responsive and very frustrating. Placing the ebook in main memory vs. storage card has no affect on speed.

i have all the updates installed on my device (1.1 rom + newest sd driver).

Any help with speeding MS reader up or preventing adobe from crashing?

Thanks!
-nic

Nic:

What version of Microsoft Reader are you using? If you are using a Reader that was from before Version 2.4 performance is likely to be very slow due to the different image rendering between the two versions.

Please look at your machine carefully. Some folks are using two versions of Reader and are not aware of it. It is not unusal to find an old version installed to the default location (especially if Reader was installed as part of the ROM) and a new version located on a storage card or a custom location. The Shortcut placed by the Microsoft Reader will always point to the Reader in the \windows directory of your device. You can change this by creating a new shortcut pointing to the updated location and renaming the old one.

If after all of this you still discover that you continue to have issues please feel free to post a reply back here and I will do my best to try and assist you.

Sincerely,
Christine - Microsoft Reader Team

[Nurhisham Hussein]

Your pdf problem sounds like there's a delay on start up, before the SD card can be read - not much you can do about that unfortunately. As for your MS reader problem - are you using DRM books? How much free RAM do you have? How big is your card? Have you upgraded to ver2.4?

I would suggest, if you're a regular reader and switch e-book back and forth from PC to Pocket PC and vice versa - delete the LitPath.lpt file in the root directory of your PPC periodically. This file tracks every book, bookmark and annotation you've used, whether it's still on your PPC or not. You should also delete any annotations/bookmarks you are no longer using, this can be found in the 'My Documents/Annotations' folder. Both these steps will save precious RAM, and may help speed things up as well.

My only other suggestion is to think about an upgrade to your PPC, though I doubt that would have more than an incremental effect.

[nic]

I have 28.33 megs of program memory available (28.33 of storage as well..its adjustable or something). The book is DRMed. I bought it off of Amazon. Would a non-DRMed book run faster? I'll investigate such things.

I'm using reader 2.4.

As for Adobe Reader, I guess I'll just move what I'm reading into my iPaq File Store and leave my extended library on my sd card.

I guess i just find it odd that I have no problems playing music and even watching video on this device, but looking at text is problamatic. Still I'm enjoying reading ebooks. Once I get started it works good. Just launching Reader to begin with is very painful.

Thanks for the bookmark/annotation tip. I'll do that.

-nic

Edit: I'll probably upgrade my pocket pc eventually, but not any time soon. The one I would want is too expensive right now, and i don't think my current one has become dated yet. Next Pocket PC will likely be a smartphone.

[Jorgen]

There is no need to upgrade. I happily read books on much slower machines: 1910, hp-548 and hp-568, usually with around half the memory you have (more if illustrated books). MS Reader is slow while starting up and sometimes when changing pages but not seriously so; I like MS Reader because the text looks so good. It has never crashed on me.

I generally copy the books I read to main memory as this allow me to change memory card, but you should not see much degradation in performance when you read from a memory card.

You can find free non-DRM MS Reader (and other formats) ebooks for example here: a modern scifi at http://www.stevejordanbooks.com/novels.htm and tons of classics at http://www.blackmask.com.

Try removing the SD card from your machine, copy the book by Jordan (average size: 267K) into main memory and time it.

Jorgen

[Nurhisham Hussein]

Yeah, I didn't think an upgrade would help much - though a VGA screen makes reading a much greater pleasure.

[nic]

I think I like MS Reader better then Adobe Reader too.

The text is just easier to read in MS Reader, and I'm not really sure why as that "ClearType" technology is enabled on my device. Is there additional anti-aliasing going on in MS Reader?

I also like how MS Reader forces the text to be fixed margin and even adds hyphens to words making them span multiple lines. I think that may be why it is so slow. It has to calculate all that for whatever font size you have it set to.

Adobe Reader is certainly a lot snappier. I like how Adobe Reader can be put into full screen mode, and is really fast at increasing and decreasing the font size. No real "bookmark" support though :(. There is a bookmark section but I can't figure out how to add any bookmarks. I really like how I can change the color of the text and the background. Sometimes a nice dark-teal background with white text is easier to read. I think mixing it up may be better on the eyes.

-nic

[Nurhisham Hussein]

I also like how MS Reader forces the text to be fixed margin and even adds hyphens to words making them span multiple lines. I think that may be why it is so slow. It has to calculate all that for whatever font size you have it set to.

I don't think so nic, IIRC (and I'm sure Christine will correct me if I'm wrong) MS Reader uses compressed HTML. It's actually pretty quick to render, considering mobireader, u-book etc use essentially the same content, if different DRM. MS Reader actually does all the pagination in the background when you open a book - if you look carefully, especially with the full nav bar activated at the bottom (tap and hold on the page number if you've never seen this before), you'll see the full number of pages gradually increasing.

My first thought as to the slowness of MS Reader (and you're not alone in noticing this), is that it populates the library when you start it up, which could account for the slowness. I have a 1GB SD card and 1 GB Cf card, with media all over the place. I also have an audible account, and these files are picked up by MS reader as well, though the PPC version can't read these files. So it could be a function of having more storage than MS Reader usually expects - I actually have the same problem with WM Player, especially when I have my external hard drive hooked up. I have trouble accessing any media on the drive since it absolutely insists searching through ALL my storage, ALL 40+GB of it, even when I don't want it to.

[nic]

I have trouble accessing any media on the drive since it absolutely insists searching through ALL my storage, ALL 40+GB of it, even when I don't want it to.

Windows Mobile and applications made for WM just don't consider the possibility that you may have that much storage. I can see how that can be frusterating. In my case, however, after doing a hard-reset of my device, the only thing I loaded on it was MS Reader and 1 eBook and it was horribly slow to start. :cry:

Once I get going and start reading I can get to page to page without much problems. I was about to pull my hair out when I had to delete my bookmarks because the ones I was adding were running of the screen. I just need 1 bookmark. Anyway, it has to "load" that bookmarked page in order for you to delete the bookmark. Very frusterating indeed. I'll have to just write down what page I'm on, and then delete the bookmark file like what has been suggested.

[Jorgen]

Did you take the storage card out?

Something is wrong with your machine: on my heavily loaded hp-568 (slower than your machine and with 15 Mb free memory), MS Reader loaded in 5 secs. From clicking on a book to when its start page is seen: approx 3 seconds.

WHat takes time is getting to where you left off in the book: 25 secs (page 911 in a 356K DRM-free book).

Using Explorer instead: the start page arrives 9 secs after clicking on the book.

Jorgen

[comtrjl]

msreader is slowed down when first started as it scans for ebooks throughout the file system, as other posters have mentioned. once you open a specific book, it can take a long time to paginate it and since the 'annotations' directory may be permanently synced, depending on how activesync is set up, every time it writes to the file it has to be re-synced, which also slows everything down. however, unless you change the font size, the pagination doesn't need to be repeated and it only writes to the file to update how far you've read.
because of this i always find it quicker to let the pagination take place out of the cradle and keep the current book in main memory, since it seems to die sometimes if the book is on a CF card.
it's a bit quirky and not very customisable, but i spend more time with this one than any others: the .lit format is fairly widespread and it's easy to create your own.

bob