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One "killer app" on the Palm is eBooks. Face it, many of us carry these things around almost all the time. It's great to be able to make use of down time reading a good book.

Getting started

There are two things you need to read e-books on your Palm device:

  1. A "reader" application.
  2. The e-book(s).

The "reader" is an application (.prc file) that you load on your Palm to view the e-books. What reader you need depends on what type of eBook you want to view. I can think of at least 4 different eBook formats off the top of my head. However, it seems that 2 formats are moving ahead of the rest:

  • Palm DOC (no relation to Microsoft Word .doc files) is the most prevalent format. Nearly every reader out there supports it.
  • HTML

DOC readers are very plentiful. Head over to Palm Gear H.Q. and do a search on "doc reader" to find some. DOC readers are a matter of personal taste and you probably need to look at a few to find the one for you. The good news is most of them are free (like CSpotRun). The ones that are not free (ex: TealDoc) offer extra features.

Some programs (like WordSmith) let you edit the eBook.

OK. You have your reader. Now you need the e-books. Ready made e-books are available all over. Here's a couple of sites with a lot of e-books:

You can also convert many HTML files into a eBook. The best reader (in my opinion) is Plucker. This is an Open Source project that includes a reader and a way to create a eBook from any HTML page (either on your PC or somewhere on the web).

Thehigh-resolution version of the reader is finalized and out now. But to use it to its fullest, you need to create your Plucker eBook using JPluck.

"Rolling your own" eBook

Let's assume that after searching the web that you didn't find what you wanted. You can create your own e-books if you want.

Again, head over to Palm Gear H.Q. and do a search on "makedoc". This program converts text files into eBooks.

Now, you ask: "Where can I get the text files?" Well, the best places are Project Gutenberg and the Wiretap Electronic Text Archive. Both places are an archive of classic (i.e. out of copyright) works that have been scanned into text files. Shakespeare, Tarzan, Poe, Jack London and more.

Some helpful guidelines for making an e-book from a text file:

  1. Many text files have a carriage return/line feed after each line. Change this (using your favorite text editor) to a CR/LF every paragraph. This will let the DOC reader wrap to fit your Palm screen.
  2. Consider breaking up larger documents into smaller ones. i.e. chapters. This lets smaller Palms control how much space they want to allocate for e-books. If you use a Unix variant, the csplit utility usually works very nice. If you run Windows, there are ports of csplit that will work for you. Check the web.

As an example, here is The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells (about 451K) that has been reformatted and broken into chapters for the Palm.

Alternative Formats

While the DOC format is the most common for e-books on the Palm, there are other formats. These formats are similar to the DOC format in that you need a reader application and a program to create the e-book from a file.

What's nice about these formats is that the keep more of the formatting of a real book. DOC was made to be a simple "large memo" type of reader. It doesn't support a bold or italic or underscore.

A good example is Palm Digital Media (nee Peanut Press). You have to put the codes to make italics and underscore into your text file and then run the Peanut 'makebook' program. But now you have an e-book that contains just about everything you would see in a paper books.

iSilo also supports graphics and formatting.

The drawback to all these formats is that they are proprietary. If they go out of business, you are pretty much screwed. My suggestion is to stick with the open formats and make sure that you get the eBook in "source" format (i.e. before it's made into an eBook).