How I read ebooks
Posted on August 19, 2006
Well, it appears the link from Boing Boing to my article about locating DRM-free ebooks may have brought a little bit more traffic here than normal (click on the thumbnail for a close-up). As a result there are a lot of good comments about other places to get your scifi than the 5 I mentioned. I’ll wait a little longer and write up a summary to get all the links in the one spot.
But, in the meantime, I thought I’d point out how I go about actually reading ebooks rather than just aquiring them. I’ll start with the reading software, and work back to ebook formats.
μBook
If you want to read ebooks comfortably then (in my opinion) μBook the best choice, and the only software you should need. It has support for the most formats, runs on Windows, Pocket PC and now has a ‘lite’ Palm version (Sorry no *nix/OSX - any alternative suggestions in the comments?). It’s not free, but at $15 US I think it is worth it.
In my experience, the main differentiating factor with ebook software is support for formats. Microsoft Reader and eReader only appear to support their own, proprietary formats, which are normally DRMed. Does this seem silly to you? An ebook reader prorgam that cannot even open a text file for reading? Crazy.
Mobipocket has support for a few more formats, such as RTF, HTML and TXT, but μBook has support for many more:
- Renders .TXT, .RTF, .HTML, .PML, .PDB and .PRC (Non-Secure), files book-like.
- Extracts text out of .PDF (Non-Secure) files.
- Displays PRC, RTF and HTML images, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, .WMF (in RTF) or .BMP.
- Opens text inside .ZIP, .CHM and .RB files, uncompressing paragraphs on the fly, limiting the amount of memory required (except CHM).
It’s that last point that seems most important to me. I think ebooks should be in the most open format that can support all the features required. To me, that would probably be HTML, but with multiple pages, images and style sheets you can end up with a few files per ebook. Μbook (Μ is a capital μ) allows you to zip them up so they can be in a single file.
So, anyway, on to ebook formats.
Ebook Formats
First off the bat, Adobe PDF (as an ebook format) is evil. Very evil. No good unless you want to read them on a screen that is at least as big a sheet of paper. I normally read ebooks on my Pocket PC or my Tablet PC so I need my ebooks to be in a format that can be read on any size screen, and PDF does not cut it in this regard. I normally use Adobe Acrobat to convert the PDFs to something more useful, normally RTF or text. If the PDF is locked so I cannot save it as something else then I don’t read it - too much trouble.
If I’m buying an ebook from somewhere online, like Fictionwise, I normally get (unsecure, DRM-free) Palm Doc (pdb) or Mobipocket (prc) versions, as they work well in uBook.
If I’m getting some short fiction from the web somewhere, I normally try and find a ‘printer-friendly’ format and save the HTML file. If the story has important images, then I use Firefox’s ’save as -> web page, complete’ option to save the page to a folder, and zip that up.
One final suggestion if a website has too much junk around the fiction: Use the Scrapbook extension for firefox. It allows you to save a selection to a file, including all the images.
To the future: OpenReader maybe? Sounds good, but so far its been mostly vaporware its been a long time coming - David’s comment below has details. I really think there needs to be a free and open standard in this space, and I hope it’s not too far away.
» Filed Under books, ebooks, fiction, howto, sf
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8 Responses to “How I read ebooks”
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[...] UPDATE II: I have written a post about how I read ebooks that might interest you. [...]
well i did not now about it & i will try it. as i read my books on my IPaQ as well.
i for myself have buy a small MS reader Generator by the name of “Reader Works” that permit me to generate every kind of txt files to MS Reader format.
ilan
Thanks, David, for the mention of the OpenReader standard for e-books and other publications. “Vaporware,” however, would be quite off the mark, especially now. The actual facts are far more interesting.
A highly polished, OpenReader-compatible version of dotReader, the first implementation of the standard, will be out in the next month or so. We’d love other implementations to follow. Meanwhile Rosetta Solutions, a prominent format translator that does work for major publishers, is very happy with OpenReader technically and plans to use the format for a major international aid organization. It’ll be great if you and your readers can spread the happy news. Thanks! If you’re sick of the proprietary approach prevailing, here’s a chance to change that.
dotReader’s developer, OSoft, is a little two-man company in Washington State without the big guys’ promo budgets. But technically its new reading program will be far ahead, with such features as shared annotations and interbook deep linking (just two examples!). In the near future it will be possible for forums and even blogs to appear within OSoft’s books.
Freeload Press, a textbook publisher, mentioned last week by the Associated Press, ABC News, etc., will be releasing ad-supported dotReader books in the near future. The format can be used without or without ads.
Meanwhile major book publishers and other companies, including one of the world’s most famous high-brow magazines, are taking a good look at the format and reader. The big question is, “Who’s gonna be first?” We have no control over publishing bureaucrats. But I will say that a number of them are tired, tired, tired of the Tower of eBabel–all those clashing e-book formats. We know the game plan of the big boys. They’re going to talk open but act proprietary, through DRM gotchas. Sony is one of the biggest villains, with the BBeB format, which even a blogger with Adobe, a Sony partner, regards as ephemeral. OSoft, by contrast, wants e-book standards for everything.
To see OSoft’s dotReader, check out the preview of the interface; then Actually the main interface shown is just one of a bunch of possibilities. This is an open-source program open to endless changes.
For a Binder Document draft spec of the OpenReader standard, go here, and for an actual book in the format, go here. For more info on the format, contact Jon Noring, the Consortium’s main founder.
I’m, too, am a fan of uBook and have pestered OSoft to pick up various features in dotReader. OSoft will be all ears for people wanting features. Just e-mail the CEO, Mark Carey, and he’ll see if he can oblige.
Thanks,
David Rothman
Co-founder of the OpenReader Consortium
and moderator of TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, telephone 703-370-6540
Ok, vaporware was a bit harsh. Sorry. It has been a long time coming though. I’ll update the post.
Thanks for the update, David, and I hope you’ll drop by the dotReader site and add your own suggestions. David R
May I suggest Plucker (as long as you’re using Palm OS, that is)?
It’s free, as in beer and Open sauce.
You can get it at http://www.plkr.org/ .
I quoteth:
Plucker is an offline Web and e-book viewer for PalmOS® based handheld devices and PDAs. Plucker comes with Unix, Linux Windows and Mac OSX tools, scripts, and conduits that let you decide exactly what part of the World Wide Web you’d like to download onto your PDA (as long as they’re in standard HTML or text format). These web pages are then processed, compressed, and transferred to the PDA for viewing by the Plucker viewer.
Plucker supports many features, including clickable images (pan and zoom), italic, narrow, and HiRes fonts, multiple concurrent databases, configurable display parameters and stylus options (gestures and hardware button navigation) ZLib and DOC compression, Perl and Python conduits and parsers, a Windows fully-integrated installer, and a whole lot more!
Through the use of intelligent desktop ‘parsers’, content can be created for Plucker from many sources, including RSS, RDF, text files, HTML, PDF, and many other file formats.
Plucker is Free Software and that means that you can use it without charge, you can give it away to others, and that you can even modify the program (or pay others to do it for you) to customize it or add the features you want.
/end quote
I use it to read the up-to-date news on my cheapo Palm on the way to work. It’s very easy to use and supports a wide range of Operating systems. It would’ve been nice if there was a PocketPC version for you Windows guys out there, but still, it’s a very useful ebookreader…
FBReader is the best Linux e-book reader: http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader
Supported formats are: fb2, html, plucker, Palmdoc (aportis doc), zTxt, TCR, RTF, OEB, and TXT. The last time I heard: Non-DRM’ed mobipocket, CHM, and OpenReader support are all scheduled for the next major release. It also reads directly from tar, zip, gzip and bzip2 archives. On my Nokia 770, I usually read plucker format books using FBReader.
Personally I’ve stuck with Mobipocket Reader both on my first smartphone with a decent screen, Sony Ericsson P800 running SymbianOS, and now a XDA IIi running Windows Mobile with a huge beautiful screen, perfect for ebooks.
Keep up the good work, David, I’ll be adding your blog to my bookmarks.