Read an eBook on my mobile phone? I'll admit I was skeptical at first.
Although I've been reading books on a Palm OS PDA for years it has a relatively large 3 inch screen. I thought downgrading to the mobile's 1.9" screen would make reading impossibly painful. I quickly discovered that I was wrong. I found that I could read just as fast and with as much enjoyment on the smaller screen as with the PDA or even a printed book. Sounds impossible, but I think having a limited amount of text on the screen helps me focus. With a larger screen or a real book, I would frequently skip back to re-read something and then have to search to find my place again. The small screen discourages back-skipping which I discovered I didn't really need to do for good comprehension. Because the small screen holds just the right amount of text (around 240 characters) to read at a single glance I never loose my place. One of the techniques taught in speed reading classes is to pace yourself by following the text with your finger. The small screen seems to have a similar effect for me.
Reading mobile eBooks hasn't really caught on yet in the West but it's very big in Japan where mobile eBook sales totaled $58 million US dollars last year. By way of comparison, eBook sales of all kinds in the US in 2005 were only $12 million and I'm sure mobile sales amounted to only a small percentage of that total.
So how does one go about reading eBooks on a phone? Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian users have a number of free readers to choose from. Two of the best are Mobipocket and eReader which both support DRM'ed books meaning that you can purchase and read current best sellers. Mobipocket also has a reader for most recent Blackberrys. Some good smartphone readers for unprotected content are Plucker (Palm) and readM (S60). Almost all the smartphone readers support a full range of formating like bold, italic, images and multiple fonts in the same document and they can read books in many formats without conversion.
Don't have a smartphone? Java ME based readers work on almost any phone. There are at least two mobile websites that offer free Java eBooks for download. Manybooks ( m.manybooks.net) has over 17,000 classic and Creative Commons licensed books and Wattpad (m.wattpad.com) has about 1700 books and documents uploaded by users. I tried both these sites but neither really worked for me. Most books from Manybooks were too large (over 180KB) to load on my phone. Wattpad offers the option to split books into 64 or 128 KB chunks which should have worked but I got a "VM Class Loading Error" trying to run the books on both a Motorola i855 and a Z8. An old Nokia 3650 at least loaded the books but the Wattpad reader only let me read the first pages before it refused to page down any more! I know that books from both these sites do work on many phones so I recommend trying them first. Downloading books OTA is certainly the easiest way to get books on a phone.
Update 6-July-2011: The Avast virus scanner on my PC is reporting that the TequilaCat.org web site is currently infected and distributing malicious software. I've removed the links to the site from this post and posted a scanned and verified clean copy of the TequilaCat Reader and Desktop Shell here: wapreview.com/download/TequilaCat BookReaderConverter.zip
Eventually I found TCBR (tequilacat.org/dev/br/index-en.html) which stands for TequilaCat Book Reader. It worked perfectly on all my phones. TCBR is a powerful and user friendly piece of software. The way it works is that you run a program called TCBR Shell on a Windows PC to create a custom Java Midlet containing one or more eBooks. The shell knows the capabilities of many popular phones so in most cases the only configration needed is picking the brand and model of your phone from a dropdown. If your phone is not listed, choosing the Generic MIDP 2 option for current phones or Generic MIDP 1 for older ones and a maximum jar size of 64 KB seems to always work. If the book you are building is larger than the maximum, TequilaCat Shell will split it up into multiple files. I think TequilaCat is the only Java app that has worked on every single phone I've tried.
Creating a book with TCBR Shell is easy. You can either drag and drop files on the TCBR window or click Add and browse for files. A preview pane lets you view the book to check formatting. Once you've selected your files, press Create to build your Midlet.
By itself, Tequilacat can only create Java books from plain text files, but the latest version (2.2.8) uses plugins to support other formats. The Tequilacat website (http://tequilacat.org/dev/br/help.html) has links to plugins handling HTML, PDF, Aportis DOC, RTF, TCR and Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. The Shell's file browse will only show files that can be converted using the filters you have installed.
Once you've created the Midlet all that's left is to copy the .jad and .jar files to your phone using Bluetooth, a data cable or by uploading it to a mobile file sharing site like Mobango and then downloading it to your phone.
It a bit of a shame that there is no way to legally read copyrighted best sellers on non-smartphones. I think the eBook vendors are missing an opportunity by not selling eBooks in Java Midlet form. However, there is plenty of good free reading available. In the US, any book published before 1911 is out of copyright and freely distributable. More and more writers are releasing books under the various Creative Commons licenses. Lately I've enjoyed several Creative Commons books by Cory Doctorow, an excellent science fiction writer. I particularly liked his novel Down and out in the Magic Kingdom and his latest work Overclocked, a collection of short stories. Most of Cory Doctorow's books are available from Manybooks and Wattpad. They can also be found in formats compatible with TCBR on the author's site and at Project Gutenberg.
well i tapped the top line, select files-then it says-" foliant may access read user data continue?" i selected >allow.then it goes to> drives <under which listed are-- filesystem, graphics, mms, music, photo,and record.
here is the problem . my phone does not search for files in the memory card. instead it wants files in the above mentioned folders of the phone memory. i moved the fb2 files to one of the folders listed above and the result is positive.now i would request you to suggest some of the english titles which attracted you.thanks and have a nice day.
well i tapped the top line, select files-then it says-" foliant may access read user data continue?" i selected >allow.then it goes to> drives <under which listed are-- filessystem, graphics, mms, music, photo,and record. i tapped filesystem and get add folder content with a plus sign.if tap there nothing happens. i tapped ok btn and it says the error message " java language null pointer---". may be the reader is incompatible with this device ia have made a search in google to find out any help regarding the reader suitable for this particular model of samsung but failed to get any.even the model's mannual does not have a reference to ebook reading.
"java lang null pointer exception 0"
Tapped Select Files,underneath which i get file filter, below this i see a list-text files, fb2 files,archives,and then other files. i tapped fb2 files.there is a green tick mark. but then nothing happens.i am not able to go to the folder in which the book is stored, actually it is stored in the memory card and the application is installed in games folder of the phone. is it necessary to store the book in the same folder of the phone memory?
1 Start Foliant
2 Tap the Add Book icon (second icon from the left. Looks like a book with a plus sign on it)
3 Tap Select Files and browse to the folder containing the book (.fb2 or .txt format)
4 Tap the book's filename
5 Tap Add to Library
I have installed calibre in my computer. the calibre mannual says--->
Open Calibre and select the e-book to convert in the
library list.
Connect your e-book reader to your computer. Calibre
takes a moment to detect and scan your e-book reader.
Click the 'Send to device' button in the top tool bar.
Calibre is smart enough to know if the book is in a format
supported by your reader. If it’s not, it will ask you if you
want to auto convert it. Say yes, and it will take care of
the conversion and put the book on your reader.
That’s all there is to it. Doing it is easier than it sounds because
all you need to do is select the book you want on your device
now that i have samsung c6712, i have to use foliant. so if i install it on my mobile. then to add a fb2 ebook to my mobile, what to do? as per the instructions above, i have to connect the device(the mobile phone in which the foliant has been installed?). but since they have not provided the data cable with the phone, i am not able to connect the phone to the computer. instead i can store the fb2 ebook to my memory card through a card reader. then if i put the card in the phone will it read? thanks
i have got the foliant jar folder.what to do next? should i copy the jar folder to the memory card of my phone?. then what to do for the installation? kindly give a detailed instruction please.
Try copying the jar to the memory card and opening it with the phone's file manager.
Instructions for using TCBR are inside the zip in the file /help/help.html
Instructions on using Calibre can be found on the Calibre site: http://calibre-ebook.com/help
Java eBooks are about half the size of the same book in PDF format.
I don't know of any way of converting PDFs using just a phone unfortunately. If you don't a PC your can download free Java eBooks from http://mnybks.net/ http://mobile.booksinmyphone.com/ http://m.wattpad.com/ or http://m.gutenberg.org/
TCBR can import PDF's and the Open Source PC app Calibre, which is available for Windows, Linux and OS X, can convert PDFs and many other formats into FB2 or text formats supported by Foliant.
what I do
my question is ... Is there any ebook reader for Touch screen phones... Samsung Chamo Duos (GT-E2652)
The other Java readers mentioned in this post (Wattpad, Manybooks or TCBR) may also work.
i have Samsung gt s3310 model and i am big fans of reading books on mobile ,Would you please tell where can i get the ebook reader for my mobile .
Samsung SGH e250i? Where can i download an ebook reader for my phone?
http://m.wattpad.com/
http://wapreview.com/download/TequilaCat%20BookReaderConverter.zip
http://m.albite.vlexofree.com/reader
m presntly using samsung corby GT c3510..i wana noe how cn i read pdf files or ebook on my cell...??
thanx
I have a nokia C3 .. What platform doe it support? what do u think are the files it will support for ebook viewing? and where can i get the software for these?
Thank you very much!
Another one to consider is Foliant (link and discussion at http://blog.wapreview.com/8651/ ) which is a touch screen optimized eBook Reader.
Format doesn't really make any difference, whichever format your reader supports is what you need to use.
I don't read or speak Hindi so I can't help you with finding Hindi books.