amphichon

So for the last few days I’ve been reading a lot, mainly on my Palm.

I can’t say enough good things about a Tungsten with a decent SD card – I can walk around with (literally) hundreds of books on my T3 and read on the train, in bed, at the lakefront, wherever. I only wish the battery life was longer – I get three or four hours, which is not bad, but it has a habit of quitting when I’m in the middle of a book. (Ack – I shouldn’t have looked cause now I have Palm envy, but the new T5 models apparently come with a 160Mb flash drive and cost less than I paid for my T3. On the other hand, I guess I can take some solace in the fact that I have of the few Palms with moving parts, even if it was sort of an evolutionary dead end.)

A few thoughts and resources for anyone thinking about using a Palm as a mobile library –

• Ebooks are everywhere.

Project Gutenberg is still your best bet for older stuff, and other retailers like Powells and Amazon offer current titles for purchase and download as well. If you’re less concerned about copyright, BitTorrent is terrific. Several of the big torrent sites have active ebook trading communities – I like Demonoid myself. One of the best things about book trading through torrents is that you come across huge collections of special-interest books. It’s not uncommon to find packages of several gigabytes’ worth of programming or computer science books, for example. You’ll also occasionally find books through bittorrent sites that might be impossible to find otherwise. A good example that recently turned up in file-trading communities is the “Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments”, published in 1960, inspiration for some strange-but-true events and now very rare (copies in good condition occasionally sell for upwards of $2000).

• DataVis’ Documents to Go is your friend.

They packaged DtG along with my T3 and I expect most of the other Tungsten models. (You can get it here otherwise, as well as various other places here and there around the web.) I didn’t pay much attention to it at first, since I assumed it was geared primarily at reading and editing MS Office documents on the Palm. Well, it is, and it does that pretty well, but the interesting thing is that it’s also one of the fastest and easiest ways to convert pretty much any document file to Palm format and sync it. I use it a lot for turning Acrobat files into Palm PDBs – you just drag the file into the DtG window (there’s a pane to install directly to the SD expansion card), tell DtG that you want it to be stored as a Palm PDB, tell it not to bother to keep it in sync (since you won’t be editing it), and you’re ready to hotsync.

• iSilo is also your friend.

This one is more a matter of personal preference, but I’ve used a handful of different Palm document readers and I always come back to iSilo. It’s free, it’s fast, it’s flexible. Browsing for documents on either internal storage or an SD card is quick and painless. It’s got the smoothest autoscroll around, and it’s easy to configure the hardware buttons to control stop/start and speed with one hand (extremely handy when you’re reading on the train and hanging on with the other hand). It’s got a nice full-screen mode and seamlessly supports the extended T3 screen. And while I understand it’s got some nice features for bookmarking, I never use them, since even when you close a “book” file it seems to remember where I was, next time I open it. They even offer a free tool to convert several different document and image formats to a proprietary iSilo format which offers 20% better compression than standard Palm files. All things considered, it’s hard to beat iSilo.

• If you like comics, consider AcidImage and CardExport.

Computer-savvy fans of comics and graphic novels are probably already aware of the CBR and CBZ formats – they’re basically archives (RAR and ZIP respectively) of sequential JPG images, used by programs such as the excellent CDisplay to view comics in electronic format. (Again, there are various places to find these files online, the easiest being your favorite bittorrent site.) While I haven’t spotted anyone developing a Palm version of CDisplay, it’s very easy to just open these files in your archive utility of choice and extract the images into a folder which can then be moved to your Palm for viewing. My tools of choice here are CardExport and AcidImage.

CardExport is one of those indispensable tools that should come with every Palm – put your handheld in the cradle, run this program and immediately the SD card is visible to your PC as a logical drive. Since it basically pretends to be a USB storage device, it works fine in Windows, OSX, Linux or anything else you’ve got that supports USB storage. In this case, you can make a directory, call it “Comics”, and just drop your folder of JPG images into it.

Next you need an easy way to get to that folder and view the images. Here’s where Acid Image comes in. You’ve probably got an image viewer on your Palm already, but odds are Acid Image is faster and more flexible, particularly when it comes to viewing image files scattered around on your SD card. At launch, Acid Image scans and lists all folders in which it found image files – pick the folder with your comic book JPGs, pick the first image, and you’re off and running. Since the images are numbered sequentially, using the “next” hardware button in AcidImage will move you to the next page automatically. The pan and zoom features in AcidImage are friendly enough that after a few pages (and maybe some tweaking in the Preferences menu) the interface seems pretty much transparent. I admit, it’s not as quick and easy as reading CBR files on the PC, but at the moment it’s a pretty effective solution.
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One thing that I haven’t yet figured out (and if anyone has thoughts on this, I’d certainly appreciate your input) – I’ve got several ebooks in CHM (Compiled Help Module, aka Windows Help) format, and I still haven’t figured out any effective way of reading these on the Palm. HTML files (ie, collections of interlinked pages) are also a pain in the neck… I think there’s a way to get these into iSilo format but I haven’t spent much time on it yet. (I’ve got gigs of books to get through in other formats before those files really start to bug me.)

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