» Saturday, 15 August A.D. 2009
android ebooks
I found FBReader today, which also has a version for Android. I was pleased with this discovery, as it enables me to start using my G1 for book reading, which was one of the motivating reasons for buying it. Even better, Project Gutenberg provides its books in a format (EPUB) that FBReaderJ understands.
The good: I have Austen, Augustine, Dickens, Chesterton, Dostoyevsky, Doyle, Gibbon, and de Tocqueville on my phone, ready to pull up at a moments notice. I have read six chapters of Pride and Prejudice already.
The bad: The formatting on some of the books is only so-so. Some of them were clearly not designed for ebook reading, but rather for viewing in a text editor or something similar. The footnotes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire are particularly bad. I am sad that I'm not going to have Stephenson or Wolfe or whoever on my phone anytime soon, but that's the way things work at the moment.
The ugly: For reasons unknown to me, each text in Project Gutenberg receives its own private URL, but each author links into the middle of a page listing all the works by authors whose last names begin with the same letter (so “Dickens” links into the middle of the “D” page and so forth). This scheme may have worked well when the project was somewhat smaller and may still work well for examining an author's works on a desktop machine...but it's truly awful to attempt to view one of these alphabet pages on a mobile phone. I suppose I could download the texts to my SD card from my desktop...even so, the current scheme does not scale and will only get worse as relatively less powerful devices than desktops become a predominant way of accessing the web.
Now we just need the Christian Classics Ethereal Library to offer EPUB books and we'll be all set. (Some works are offered in Palm's PDB format--a reader exists for the Android platform--but not all, and the PDB files are not downloadable from the G1's web browser. FAIL.)
posted by Nate @ 8:22PM