Tuesday, December 27th, 2005

The Palm as eBook reader

What exactly is an electronic book (or ebook)? Using the ever useful Wikipedia:

An e-book or ebook is an electronic or digital version of a book. The term is ambiguous, since it refers both to an individual work in digital form as a device used to read books in digital format. Some users do not use it in the second sense and use instead the more accurate "e-book device.
The e-book devices, can be either a PDA, a portable LCD memory.

The advantages of the book in electronic format are numerous. For starters, the space: Don Quixote occupies only 800 KB, so a memory card can store thousands of titles. But in addition, the book extends the possibilities of digital reading can search within the text, highlight phrases, make notes, etc.. Not only can carry novels and we want to read in spare time. There are many occupations where there is the very thing you always have your documents, catalogs, tables, instructions, etc.. Many engineers, lawyers or doctors always wear your Palm up at work as a tool.

The program that I recommend to read our eBooks on your PDA is Plucker. Already seen in more detail the operation of this program when we tried how to read the news on the Palm. Being open, free, to allow a fair chance to choose the font size, and completely eliminate the interface to read full screen, makes a perfect application for this task.


Plucker can maximize the screen

You just have to take into account one thing: Plucker only knows how to convert HTML documents. And e-books can be in many formats: PDF, DOC, RTF ... So we convert to HTML first, if we want to use Plucker and Sunrise. But there is a specific program called PDAConverter that make the whole process for us. It's easy to handle. Indicate the source file, choose the format you want to convert, and that's it. If we choose plucker as output format, genre is a file that can synchronize directly with our PDA, and read using Plucker Viewer (or Vademecum, if it is a PocketPC). PDAConverter also allows us to edit the HTML file through, to remove parts that do not want to include in the final version, modified others, and so on.


PDAConverter plucker automates the conversion from different formats

There are numerous sources on the net free e-books, ready to be played on our PDAs. Of note is the Gutenberg Project, dedicated to collecting texts that can be distributed freely. This project started in 1971 no less! You can learn more about its purpose, how it was created, how they work, etc. in this section of your page. There are a number of books in Spanish. You can also search by title and author. Besides free ebooks, of course there are very good pages where you can buy them. Not to detract against one another, I propose to those who already know some, they leave in the comments about it. Happy reading.


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