Shelf Life

Mobipocket still won’t directly add books to my memory card but a work-around is to drag and drop the e-book files from the My Documents/My eBooks folder onto the phone’s memory card. Mass storage cababilities have to be enabled in the phone’s settings for this to work. Hopefully this will work with ebooks from the public library also. It’s a little annoying that Mobipocket won’t find the card directly but the drag-and-drop is not terribly time consuming.

I bought the Collins English Dictionary from the Mobipocket bookstore and installed it on the phone. It is massive, with 500,000 entries. Mobipocket automatically recognized the dictionary and now I can use the word look-up option while reading other books and it will find the word in Collins and display the definition. Pretty slick.

Mr. Doyle

I have been thinking about getting an e-book reader for a while now. The Amazon Kindle is very intriguing but the price is pretty steep so I have been holding off. Recently Amazon released Kindle software for the iPhone. Now the Kindle looks like something I could read with, but the iPhone? How could anyone enjoy reading a novel on that tiny screen? Ridiculous! But recently one of my professors, Dr. David Loertscher, posted a link to a Wall Street journal article about ebooks (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123980920727621353.html). The article got me thinking about the experience of reading and how electronic device will change (are already changing) that. I decided I should try reading, really reading, some etext.

Now I have been using smart phones for about 4 years. Given that I have the memory of a fruitfly the personal organizer part is essential. But aside from the calendar, address book, and phone functions I don’t use my Blackberry Pearl for much. It has a mediocre camera and I have a few games on it but I just don’t get into electronic games. I also do not have a data plan or text messages on my AT&T account so I don’t do any web browsing or e-mail on it. So I am not used to spending more than a few seconds at a time looking at the 1 ½” x 1 ½” screen.

For my first e-reading experience I copied and pasted the 2nd half of the WSJ article onto the primitive text editor in the phone. Surprisingly it was not too uncomfortable reading from the phone. But what about an entire novel? There are plenty of free books available on the Web but copying and pasting chapters into a text editor would be ridiculous. So I looked for an e-book reader for the Blackberry. And just like for the iPhone, there’s an app for that. I found Mobipocket (see review below), a free program, and installed it. For my first book I chose Infected by Scott Sigler. First it is science fiction—totally appropriate for entering a new age of literature, and second I heard about it while listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Escapepod, a science fiction story site—doubly appropriate.

The Verdict: I was prepared to hate reading on my phone but I actually enjoy it. Reading a good paperback is great but the convenience of always having a book with me is pretty hard to beat. I find I am reading more often (though some of that is in small increments). If I have a few minutes to spare I always have a book handy, whether it is waiting for a class to arrive in the library, warming up on the stationary bike at the gym, or if I have a few minutes before I need to pick up my son, the book is always there. In that respect it has the Kindle beat. Mobipocket also allows you to subscribe to tons of newsfeeds in many different languages so also have news articles in English and Spanish on my device. And I have not really been that bothered by the small screen. Once you master the navigation the text flows pretty easily. A bigger screen would be better but I really like being able to put my phone in my pocket. I won’t stop reading ink-on-paper books anytime soon but I will be downloading more e-books and continuing to read on my phone.

Next steps:
• Figuring out how to download e-books from the public library to my phone
• Figuring out how I can use e-books to get kids to read more

The Good:
Since I don’t have a data plan with AT&T for my Blackberry the most important feature for an e-book reader for me is the ability to download e-books to my computer and send them to the phone. Mobipocket does that very well. You can browse several e-book stores and a large collection of free news feeds from the desktop and you can set it up to automatically push content to the phone when it is docked.

The app is free, which is another good thing. The books however are not. Current titles are priced like audiobooks, which is to say expensive. A recent release science fiction novel cost me $24.00. There are free downloads of books out of copyright available through one of the Mobipocket stores but modern books are going to cost you.

Navigation is fairly simple and the program responds pretty quickly. That makes reading easier. You can set colors and font size and there are several pre-sets for quickly changing the screen if ambient conditions change.

The Bad:
Navigating the stores could be easier. There is a keyword search but the categories are overly broad and there is no breakdown into sub categories so you may end up having to go through dozens of screens to find what you want.

Menu navigation is not entirely intuitive. Making a book mark is easy but it took a little fiddling to figure out how to get back to it (bookmarks are kept in an “annotations” list).

The Ugly:
The program can’t find the SD card in my phone so it is using main memory which cannot hold much. I have e-mailed support but have not heard anything. If this problem isn’t resolved quickly I will have to find another reader.

By Mr. Doyle