µBook4 February 2003 µBook (sometimes called uBook due to the visual similarity between the symbol for micro and the letter U) is as close as they come to a "universal" ebook reader for the Pocket PC (and desktop Windows as well). What makes it so special? It reads most of the formats out there in a clean, skinnable interface, and oh, yeah, it's free. I downloaded the latest version of µBook from Gowerpoint.com and was promptly blown away. I'd taken a look at an earlier version of the program and didn't see what all the fuss was about, but I see it now. This is my new favorite way to read on my Pocket PC. What's so great about it? Well, lots of things. First off, it requires no conversion. I've stated before that one of the things that spurred my "defection" from the Palm OS ranks to the Pocket PC was that I no longer had to monkey around with file conversion foolishness on the Pocket PC. Rather than laboriously converting files on my desktop to Palm-readable databases before I could access them on my mobile device, I could just copy them over and go. I didn't notice until I got into µBook that I'd still been dealing with that on the Pocket PC in regards to ebooks. I've spent countless hours of time preparing files for conversion into Palm Reader or Microsoft Reader format, tweaking PML markup code for book after book. I did this because even on the Pocket PC I had to convert books into Palm Reader format if I wanted to read them in a clean, unobstructed user interface, have the Pocket PC automatically save my place, full justify the text and antialias the fonts for easy reading. µBook makes all that a thing of the past. µBook reads almost everything. It supports ASCII text, RTF, HTML, MobiPocket and PalmDoc ebooks, uncompressed or compressed with either ZIP or RAR encoding. Although nearly everything about it is configurable, the defaults do a great job of intelligently rendering plain text files with book formatting (it understands the Internet standard conventions of marking text with asterisks for *bold* and underscores for _italics_), it dynamically generates tables of contents based on tweakable criteria and it handles line breaks and paragraph breaks with aplomb. It may be the perfect reader for reading Project Gutenberg texts. No reformatting to "clean up" the hard line breaks is necessary. PG texts look typographically professional without any effort. In fact, it read everything I threw at it with nary a whimper. And while µBook defaults to indented first lines with no space between paragraphs, it took only a few seconds to convert it to my preference of unindented paragraphs with a blank line between them (which most people find easier to read on a small screen). µBook comes with three fonts by default, embedded into the program. These are Times, Arial and Courier, the "standards" for serif, sans serif and monospace fonts, respectively. While these certainly look okay, you can also add your own fonts on either the desktop or the Pocket PC by simply tapping or clicking the + sign next to the font list and selecting the font you want from the list of those installed on your system. I've experimented around a bit and found that I prefer Georgia (a free download if you don't have it) looks best on my XDA, usually in the "Medium" size (you get five choices for font size, but you can't specify a point size manually; it's all relative). I also tend to have "Smooth" fonts selected rather than "Sharp". This antialiases the fonts, giving them a weight and curvature that I find makes the letter and word shapes easier to recognize, hence easing reading. The smoothing is done by antialiasing entire pixels rather than ClearType style subpixel rendering, so some fonts tend to look chunky rather than smooth. Some trial and error is necessary to find something that really looks good to you. Okay, so it looks great. But how does it read? Alarming well, actually. Once you're in a book, µBook tends to shut up and get out of the way, at least as well as Palm Reader and Microsoft Reader if not better. First off, it's skinnable, so you can find a skin for it that looks perfect for you. I tend to stick with the "Book" skin that comes with it, which places the title of the document vertically along a "spine" running the left edge of the screen, then devotes the rest of the screen to text display other than a thin line at the bottom with page numbers and navigation arrows. This skin, like most µBook skins, takes up the entire screen, completely covering the title bar on the Pocket PC. An unobtrusive plus and minus in the top corner allow you to move the skin down to uncover the title bar and Start menu. You can also run µBook without a skin, which gives you the title bar normally with a clean page of text underneath. All colors are configurable, although I find a white or off-white background works best. Some skins display clocks, some don't (the "Book" skin does not, which makes it all the easier to get "lost" in a book!) and if you don't like the ones available, you can roll your own, as skin files are just ASCII text collections of parameters and screen coordinates. Some of the full-screen skins look really slick in two column mode on a landscape PC monitor. I mentioned page numbers above. Like Palm Reader and Microsoft Reader, µBook paginates the entire file into screen sized pages. This is done in a background thread, allowing you to get into the book and start reading before the pagination is done. The "total" page number will show a plus sign next to it until the pagination is complete. You can easily jump to arbitrary page numbers, to the next section, or to the beginning or end of the book. µBook will repaginate when you change skins, but because this is done in the background, it does not entail the lengthy waits that readers often encounter in Palm Reader and Microsoft Reader. µBook also supports annotations and highlighting of text, as well as copying text for pasting into other documents. Highlighting can be any color you like, and you can underline and strikeout text as well. In the name of efficiency, annotations are not stored permanently, but only for the last n files accessed, where n defaults to 100. The latest version of µBook sports a new library manager, where thumbnails of the books' covers are shown instead of or in addition to the book titles. Assigning book covers is a simple matter of putting a GIF or JPG file in the same directory as the book with the same name as the book (other than the extension, of course). Moby_Dick.jpg would be used as the cover for Moby_Dick.txt. This adds a nice air of professionalism to the program, and gives me back a feature I really liked in Microsoft Reader 1.0 on my Jornada 548 that disappeared in Microsoft Reader 2.0 on Pocket PC 2002 devices. So what's µBook missing? Well, a few things. First off, I tend to keep documents in two different places on my Pocket PC. Short articles that I intend to read soonish are stored in "\My Documents\Reading Material", mostly because that's where HTML files go automatically when I hit F7 to QuickSave them in CrazyBrowser. Printable pages of long discussion threads from Pocket PC Passion and Brighthand end up here, as well as printable versions of articles from Wired, c|net and other favorite web haunts. My rule of thumb is that anything that's going to take more than a minute or two to read will be shunted to the Pocket PC, where it will be easier on the eyes than reading on my ancient Pentium II laptop. The problem is that my XDA, like most of my Pocket PCs, only has 32MB of RAM. I've long since gotten into the habit of storing actual ebooks on the storage card. While it's great that µBook can read from anywhere on the device rather than just the conventional "My Documents plus one level" and doesn't require a specific folder of its own like Palm Reader, it would be nice if I had a quick way to switch the library focus from "\My Documents\Reading Material" to "\Storage Card\eBooks" without having to manually renavigate the directory tree each time. µBook does remember the last five documents viewed for quick recall, but I find that after reading several articles, I have to go dig up the ebook I was reading all over again. The font smoothing, while alarmingly good, doesn't support ClearType. This would make certain fonts so much better on the Pocket PC and lower resolution PC screens. Antialiasing entire pixels on a Pocket PC screen makes sans serif fonts like Tahoma - which is supposed to be easily readable on screen - chunky and unattractive. One of the features I love on Palm Reader is the ability to tap and hold on a word to get the definition from the installed dictionary. I even bought the 10MB Webster's version from Palm Digital Media just to ensure that I never tap on a word I can't define. µBook supports no such lookup feature. Given that µBook can automatically define a table of contents based on things like lines starting with the word "Chapter," it's odd that it can't also put in virtual "page breaks", starting each chapter on a fresh screen the way Palm Reader does. Perhaps the developer will that that to future versions of µBook. Lastly, there is as yet no way to open secured formats like Palm Reader or Microsoft's .lit with µBook (although there may be a way to convert the latter to source XHTML and graphics that could be read in µBook). The next version of µBook should support an external API to allow others to write .DLL files that µBook could use to access formats that the author doesn't have the time or resources to support. This is a great move that will only extend µBook's reach as a universal ebook reader. Since no one seems to be working on a port of the open source Plucker for PalmOS to the Pocket PC, I'd love to see someone write a plug-in to allow µBook to read Plucker files. This one's a winner, folks. And while it's free, make use of the PayPal "Donate" button on Gowerpoint.com. µBook is well worth the $10US the author suggests if you enjoy reading on your Pocket PC. Pros and Cons:+ Clean interface perfect for "ludic" reading Jeff Kirvin
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