an awful warning

Adobe Acrobat 3.whatever for the palm is a horrible piece of software. I have been trying an ebook in Adobe DRM format. It has one good point: you can shift the book and its activation between computers. But on a palm pilot the font is ugly, and more or less fixed. You can’t make annotations (which you can on the PC version). You can’t change the background colour (and I hate white). You can’t copy chunks of text elsewhere for later processing. It’s slow, and seems to eat battery.

The alternative seems to be something called MobiPocket, which uses better fonts, has better layout, is more configurable, and uses smaller files. It will do annotations, too, though I have not yet found any way to export them.

So now I have three ebook reading programs on this palm pilot — there is also the version of palm reader which comes from Ereader. This is subtly incompatible with the normal palm reader program; it works perfectly well, but you have to pay for annotations. But I can’t get the Swedish books I am interested in in that format.

The more I use this palm pilot for reading, the less point there seems to be to ebooks. Only in queues and on the tube in rush hour is space so limited that you can’t easily read a paperback, but can read one of these.

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One Response to an awful warning

  1. wg says:

    I don’t know. I use Adobe Acrobat Reader on the Palm (Tungsten C) all the time, and like it pretty well. It was a godsend when I was reading Susanna Clarke’s book in ms…the night I got stuck traveling all the way back from Upminster on the District Line at 1am, I was damn glad to have all those hundreds of pages on it.

    wg

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