Reading On Your Palm12 May 2003 Part of being a writer is a love of reading. What's the best way to read on a Palm? On the Pocket PC, things were easy. You get Microsoft Reader whether you want it or not, and µBook handles pretty much everything else. When I switched back to a Palm recently as my primary PDA, I was faced with a dilemma. What do I use for reading? This won't be a comprehensive review of all the ebook readers for PalmOS. It can't be. There's too damn many of them. That said, I took a look at the most popular reader applications and I think I've got a pretty good grip on their pros and cons. Is there a clear winner? Not really. I've settled on one that I use for nearly everything, but it's not an ideal solution. I'm not sure there is an ideal. But if you want to read on a Palm, here's a look at the contenders. Before I get started, though, let me explain my ground rules. I needed an application that would do several things well. I needed it to be able to read ebooks, both commercial and free. I needed high-quality typography, with high-resolution serif fonts and, if possible, full line justification. I needed the application to be able to read web pages I've saved for offline reading (I save the printable versions of about a dozen web forum threads per day on average for reading on the go). My yardstick was µBook on the Pocket PC which can read MobiPocket and PalmDoc formats, produce typography suited to "ludic" reading (see Bill Hill's "The Magic of Reading" for details) and render HTML pages I've saved to the device. Bonus points for apps that can sync web content on a regular basis, negating the need for the slightly quirky PalmOS5 beta of AvantGo. Palm Reader I started with Palm Reader, for two reasons. One, I have dozens of books in Palm Reader format, purchased over the years from Palm Digital Media. Two, I have Palm Reader Pro and Palm Reader Standard comes with just about every Palm handheld. It's as close to the ubiquity of Microsoft Reader on the Pocket PC that you'll get on the Palm. Palm Reader isn't bad. It supports sub-pixel font rendering and the fonts from the installable font packs are actually quite good (I'm a big fan of 16pt Charter for ebook reading; it's not Georgia, but it's close). The selection of media is certainly acceptable, with thousands of books available on Palm Digital Media. I'd go broke just trying to buy up the stuff that's already in my wish list, much less keeping up with new releases. The downside is twofold. One is that my saved HTML can be pretty hard to read if the HTML itself isn't clean. Printable Brighthand forum pages look pretty good in Palm Reader as vanilla Doc files, but the same from Palm Infocenter are almost gibberish. All I do to get these articles on my Palm is run them through a utility to strip out the HTML tags and convert the resulting plain text to PalmDoc. It's a classic case of garbage in, garbage out. The other downside to Palm Reader is that converting ebooks you already have to PML (Palm Markup Language) for conversion to a properly formatted Palm Reader ebook is a fairly labor-intensive process. There's no batch conversion option, and each book needs to be proofed to make sure there aren't any errant tags causing problems. (I've seen imported HTML where 90% of the text is a header, or centered). The output looks stellar, but it falls somewhat short of µBook's "zip up a bunch of HTML and dump it on the card" simplicity. iSilo iSilo is just the opposite of Palm Reader. Using iSiloX to convert saved web pages or full ebooks to iSilo's format couldn't be easier. It even supports spidering sites directly from the web, replacing AvantGo's functionality. But once you get the files to the device, iSilo shows its rough edges. On high-resolution Palm SG devices (Tungsten series, Zire 71), iSilo only supports "High Density" mode, so there's no way to make fonts smaller than the standard font. I find this is still a little too big on my Zire 71, and it's not fixable without a third party tool like Fonts4TC (see below). iSilo also doesn't support full justification, so pages, even in full screen mode, tend to look chunky and ragged. On the other hand, iSilo does a great job not only with its own files and PalmDocs but can also read unconverted ASCII text files off the storage card. This feature could be more useful if the developer had made it possible to easily reopen text files for later reference, but it's still pretty neat. Deep Reader This one came highly recommended, and I can see why. Of all the ebook readers I tried, Deep Reader probably came closest to µBook's actual ebook rendering. It can display vanilla PalmDoc ebooks in either serif or sans fonts in varying sizes, does full justification and even replaces straight quotes with curly quotes on the fly. It goes as far as stripping out the blank spaces between paragraphs and indenting the first lines, simulating the typography of a paper book. I wish it provided more font sizes -- the small font size was too small, the medium was too big and the large size is suitable for reading from orbit -- but on the whole it's very nice. However, Deep Reader too falls short of perfection. The anti-aliased fonts are grayscale, not RGB, resulting in fuzzier text than would be necessary on a 150 pixels per inch screen. While the ability to read for documents in the system RAM and any of three user-configurable card folders is nice, file management was a hassle in Deep Reader. (Though not as bad as some; see below.) HandStory Handstory is a popular alternative to both AvantGo and iSilo, but I have to profess that I just don't get it. The user interface is nice enough, I supposed, and it has some really well thought-out options for filtering and categories, but I just didn't see anything that really set it apart from the competition. The PalmDoc book rendering is only average, no full justification, and nothing special in terms of fonts. MobiPocket I tried MobiPocket mostly out of laziness. Fictionwise, Baen and others release many of their books preformatted for MobiPocket and it's a relatively simple matter of converting raw HTML to MobiPocket by converting the file to a PalmDoc database without stripping out the HTML markup. For a while, I was impressed enough to consider paying the steep $20 registration. The user interface for book reading is one of the best I've seen. The text is full justified, with a thin line running along the bottom edge of the screen that slowly turns red as you progress deeper into the ebook. The top edge holds the book title (tap for a menu), a few icons to control the reader and the page number. Easy. But after I started really playing with it, MobiPocket began to annoy me. First off, to activate RGB font rendering you have to enable MobiType, which only uses one font, a modified version of Blue Highway. This sans serif font is only available in sizes suited for low-resolution, 160x160 Palms and is almost unreadably tiny on my Zire. I could use Fonts4TC (see below) to replace the normal font with Times New Roman, but then I lose RGB font smoothing. Secondly, MobiPocket's library functionality really blows. Categories are a pain to implement and it takes way too many taps to delete a file when you're done reading it. And if you don't read files in alphabetical order, you have to do a good job of remembering which file you just finished as there's no indicator of which file is "active" when you get back to the library view. If I wanted to rely on my wetware, I wouldn't be using a PDA in the first place. WordSmith Lastly, it occurred to me that I already have an application on my Palm capable of displaying PalmDoc ebooks in high-resolution serif fonts, setting bookmarks and notes, even storing documents on the card via a pretty slick VFS implementation. Why have any of the above chewing up some of my precious 13MB of RAM if I already have WordSmith? WordSmith's FineType fonts are pretty cool, and it does support a read-only view mode that makes it pretty good as an ebook reader. It's even Lefty-friendly, so I can have the scroll bar on the left and the WordSmith's full-screen mode makes reading a fairly distraction-free experience. But for all that, I have the same issue with WordSmith that I have with Palm Reader. It's a hassle to convert files into its format. Most of the books I have lying around are in HTML. I'd have to convert them to RTF and then convert the RTF to WordSmith's format. If I'm going to go through that much trouble I may as well convert them to Palm Reader format and take advantage of things like page numbers and full justification that WordSmith doesn't support. And the Winner Is... By a nose, Palm Reader. Mostly because I already have such an investment in Palm Reader format ebooks, but also because of the excellent typography and user installable fonts in hi-res friendly sizes. It doesn't do AvantGo and the formatting on saved web pages leaves something to be desired, but it's the best thing out there for actual ebooks. I might ditch AvantGo and stop using Palm Reader for saved web pages if I stick with iSilo for HTML content, both fresh and frozen. Coupled with Fonts4TC, iSilo could be a great little offline web page reader. I'll stick with Palm Reader for novels, though. With a Little Help From My Friends None of the reader applications listed above met my needs unassisted. Here's some of the other software I have lying around to fill in the gaps. Fonts4TC: Pretty much a requirement if you're not using Palm Reader with a font pack. Fonts4TC (or Fonts4TT if you're running PalmOS 5.0 instead of 5.21) replaces the system font with one of eight alternatives, including Tahoma, Times New Roman and three fonts from the late, lamented HandEra 330. Running this with Times New Roman installed -- it can store inactive fonts on the card to save space -- makes every app on your device more readable, and goes a long way towards making apps like iSilo and MobiPocket easier to read for long stretches. (If you don't have PalmOS 5, stick with FontHack123.) MakeDocW: An oldie but a goodie. I keep this one on the taskbar so I can quickly drag saved web pages to it for automated conversion and installation. It optionally strips HTML and allows you to specify .pdb or .prc for the file extension of the output files. I'm currently stripping HTML and outputting .pdb files for reading in Palm Reader, but leaving HTML in and outputting .prc files works great for MobiPocket, too. iSiloX: While iSilo does a great job with vanilla PalmDoc files and even ASCII text, this is pretty much required for reading anything with HTML formatting, and does a pretty darn good job of replacing AvantGo. It even has the option of installing files directly to the card rather than in RAM. DocInOut: Used for quick and dirty "ad hoc" conversions of text and HTML files (though I usually use MakeDocW for this) and for converting PalmDoc and MobiPocket files back into text and HTML, respectively. Invaluable if you want to read a MobiPocket file in Palm Reader, since you can convert the MobiPocket file to HTML, then open the HTML in Palm eBook Studio to make the Palm Reader version. Palm eBook Studio: An awesome tool for creating Palm Reader ebooks. For novels down to long articles, I'll make the effort to use this to create a properly formatted ebook. Palm eBook Studio is a WYSIWYG editor for Palm's PML format, and it imports from plain text, RTF and HTML. I've had great success taking the RTF-formatted books from Baen's webscriptions and converting them to PML this way. PowerRun: And finally, PowerRun. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid enough to keep all those programs installed into RAM, given that most of the aforementioned ebook readers are around 300k or so. That adds up. PowerRun allows me to store apps on my Secure Digital card transparently, without interfering with conduits, stepping on data or any of the other icky things that can happen with VFS. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |