Since my Zaurus seems to have died the Final Death (although I will be getting a replacement), and I can’t do without my reading fix, I need a way of reading books. Fortunately, help is at hand, in the form of an ebook reader for my K700i phone. It’s called BookReader, and it’s nicely free. (Not Free Software, though, as far as I can tell.) It’s a bit awkward, because it doesn’t just get loaded once and then merrily allow you to display ebooks that are uploaded separately. Instead, it comes as a JAR file (not unreasonable, since it’s a Java app) and you unpack the JAR (JAR files are just zip archives with a different extension), stick your ebook(s) inside it (calling them textfile.txt, textfile1.txt, textfile2.txt, etc.), save the jarfile, and then upload that jarfile to your phone. A little bit awkward, but not incredibly so, and it’ll certainly tide me over until I can get a replacement. The tiny font is surprisingly readable on the nice bright screen of the phone, and you can add your own font if you feel so inclined (which means it could be really minute if you were hawk-eyed).
Those of you with Bluetooth will have read “upload that jar file to your phone” and thought “yep, I can do that“. (In fact, Jono and I were experimenting with Bluetooth this very evening, synchronising a Palm Tungsten with Linux using pilot-link most successfully. Except that Evolution won’t do it, because it (well, gnome-pilot-daemon) doesn’t understand network syncs, but Jono can tell you more about that himself.) Those of you without Bluetooth may well think: how do I upload stuff? Easy. Just upload the jar file to your web server and then bang the URL into the browser (I use Orange World; don’t know how to do this on other networks, but it’ll be pretty simple). A word of warning: make sure your webserver serves it as content-type application/java-archive. Apache on Debian stable seems to have application/x-java-archive by default, and it doesn’t work if you serve it with that: the phone won’t recognise it as an application. Anyway, I’m off to read some books. And possibly investigate MIDP and MIDlets and how to make a Java MIDlet application display some arbitrary text files you have on your phone (rather than just its own JAR file contents), assuming that you can do that.
‘…I need a way of reading books…’
What on earth is wrong with reading text on paper?! You know, as in a book.
Posted by Rob on November 30th, 2004.
Damn, Rob, you beat me to it.
Posted by Matt on November 30th, 2004.
My pockets aren’t big enough.
When I’m sitting at home, with an hour to spare, I read a real paper book. (Some of you guys have seen my library; I have not forsworn the printed word!) But most of my reading is not done in such an environment. It’s done while I’m doing the 10 minute walk from the car to work. It’s done while I’m sitting on the bus on the way to LUG meets. It’s done while I’m standing outside having a cigarette. It’s done while Sam’s in a shop and I’m outside bored for ten minutes. Books are totally impractical for this purpose: they’re big and unwieldy, and when you finish one you haven’t got another one until you can get home and replace it. Reading ebooks on a device in your pocket, on the other hand, is totally ideal for this; a PDA or phone doesn’t get any bigger if you’ve got two or five or twenty books on it.
Posted by sil on November 30th, 2004.
I think its a good idea and im trying it out in a bit, i can carry my precious rfc’s with me, saves on paper.
Posted by simonb on November 30th, 2004.
Minor flaw discovered: it’s pretty bloody hard on the battery life. I’ve done about half an hour reading today, and it’s used up half of a fully-charged battery. Oof.
This might just be because battery life is oriented around the phone being in standby most of the time, as opposed to being used: a half-hour reading sesson might be the same as a half-hour phone call, which will also kill a reasonable amount of battery power. Not as much as half the battery, though; the phone has more than one hour talktime, I’m sure.
Posted by sil on November 30th, 2004.
Not sure if it will run on the k700i , but try out ReadM, I have over 1MB of books on my 7650 , and theres none of this build it into the jar lark. It also accepts .tar.bz2 files so it can be quite efficient with space.
http://zavorine.net/symbian/readm.htm
Posted by Sean O'Donnell on November 30th, 2004.
hsdrtjdz
Posted by rstj on March 16th, 2005.
LOSSS
Posted by rstj on March 16th, 2005.
LOS JETZE
Posted by rstj on March 16th, 2005.
Fuck u
Posted by Amjad on July 25th, 2005.
you cant read any book on k 700i
It does not have application peripheral interface as they say …..nothin can be done for that
but this idea is nice one..!!!!
Posted by Anonymous on January 23rd, 2006.
i need to cheat at my exames i need to know how can i make books
Posted by Muie dinamo on January 25th, 2006.
I can see why you need to cheat on your exams…
Posted by Geronimo on May 24th, 2006.
hmm, i don’t think you’re paying much attention. i have a K700i and i read alot of books already on it. and me course Bookmaniac from getjar.com made this available for me. thanks.
Posted by Gemer3one on June 20th, 2006.
Gemer3one: I can’t find anything called “bookmaniac” at getjar.com.
Posted by sil on June 20th, 2006.
Its called readmaniac.
Nice article ’sil’
Posted by duxxyuk on September 7th, 2006.
I’ll give you the latest bookmaniac. I’ve read alot of books so far from various authors, such as: Grisham, brown, king. And so on… Books like, the green mile, the gunslinger(all 4 series) i recommend that one, the rainmaker and the list goes on and on. All in all with bookmaniac i’ve gone through at least 20 books already, and that’s not even the tip of the ice berg as yet, FAR FROM IT!!
Posted by Gemer3one on September 18th, 2006.
Readmaniac, readmaniac, readmaniac. That’s it, not bookmaniac. wap.readmaniac.com
Posted by Gemer3one on September 21st, 2006.
We released mTextbox a few weeks ago. The client is installed once on your phone and you can browse or upload your own text from your PC. Take a look, we would appreciate any feedback!
http://www.mtextbox.com
Posted by Ivan on October 28th, 2006.
cool
Posted by gster on November 17th, 2006.
sweet
Posted by gster on November 17th, 2006.