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.
Reading ebooks on a SonyEricsson K700i
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