E-book Reading on the Palm Pre
I knew when I picked up the Palm Pre that I was going to do without reading e-books on the phone, at least for a while. There weren’t any e-book reader apps available for the Pre, certainly not eReader Pro, which I use on every device I touch. The good readers here lost no time in reminding me that eReader was available in the original Palm OS version and that it could be installed under Classic.
Classic is the Palm OS emulator for the Pre produced by Motion Apps that will let Pre owners run just about any old Palm app. The emulator is pretty impressive and creates an eerie Palm environment on the little screen of the Pre. It is available in the App Catalog and while expensive ($30) there is a 7-day trial available. I jumped right on it and installed eReader for the Palm OS.
It works, is about all I can say about it. The default font of the program in the emulator is pretty ugly, but it works, and it’s better than nothing. The Classic emulator creates the Palm OS environment completely, and that means the tiny screen. Only about 2/3 of the Pre’s gorgeous screen ends up displaying the e-book contents so paging is something done frequently. It’s better than nothing. I have to keep saying that because that’s about all I can say about it. The problem is the price — I don’t think it’s worth $30 for me just to run the “free” eReader app. It’s too bad. I miss my full eReader Pro. I hope a Pre version is in the stars.
Image courtesy eReader
There is now a Pre version of Shortcovers, a cloud-based e-book reader. I looked at it briefly but it feels like reading books in a browser and didn’t make for a good experience. Long-time reader Rodfather has looked at it and covers it on his blog with screen images of it in action.
I mostly read classics available on websites like Project Gutenberg, public domain. Those I can make into Word or .pdf docs.
How do those emulators look with ordinary documents?
PalmFiction has always been the best PalmOS ebook reader both in terms of options and in terms of format support. Does has anyone here tried it on the Classic emulator? I hope it will get ported to WebOS soon =)
http://www.memoware.com has tons of free and paid ebooks available in web-friendly formats (e.g., text).
There are several ebook readers coming to the Pre luckily – some patience required though
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I wonder, can the Pre be HotSynced while in Classic mode to Palm Desktop (or Outlook or Missing Sync)?
Not as far as I know or can recall. The sync functionality wasn’t going to be supported. While disappointing, I can understand that to a point. They’d have to do compatibility testing on the data formats and such.
Their web site says not currently.
I used to read a lot of ebooks on my old Palm PDA, and by far the best readerfor me was the weasel reader (at http://gutenpalm.sourceforge.net/ ). It is open source and has loads of options. I don’t have a Pre, but it will also work in the Pre’s classic mode. You may wand to check it out, as it is far superior to Palm’s ereader.
Checking the page I see that they decided to shift development for the Android. They may decide to reconsider now that the Pre is out!
Incomplete! You must also try MobiPocket. And other classic PalmOS readers others have mentioned.
And $30 is not expensive if, like me, you have 10MB of Memos and a decade of other PIM data to preserve!
Mobipocket works great on the Classic emulator.
Why is it that you can’t just drag and drop text files into the phone–like into a big capacity note page and read in landscape mode???