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23 December 2008

project gutenberg mobile edition, first impressions.

Project Gutenberg is doing a mobile edition for its books.  From their news release:

Why using Amazon’s proprietary Kindle when you can use your mobile phone instead? Today’s cell phones offer excellent screens and massive computing power to ensure best reading comfort. Mobile books do not weigh much and you can carry them with you wherever you are. Each Java / MIDP 2.0 enabled cell phone is sufficient - the most common computing platform in the world: There are by far more cell phones shipped worldwide than personal computers.

PG Mobile is a software that transfers the plain text format provided by Project Gutenberg onto small handset screens - together with all the features known from physical books like turning pages, page numbers and bookmarks. Just download the PG Mobile version of any eBook and read it on your phone: All Project Gutenberg mobile eBooks will soon be available for download as an additional file format in the download section of each Gutenberg title on Gutenberg.org. Stay tuned!

Their technology comes from Qioo.  Here's the existing Qioo Mobile Library.

Here you can download english mobile books. In most cases you need only the JAR-file. Save files in separate folder because each mobile book has the same file name. After installation an individual name is given.

Alternatively you can download the JAD-file over the air. In most cases this is the most convenient way to install a mobile book. You can do so by entering the following URL in the WAP-Browser of your cellphone (please note: you will be charged for the GPRS/UMTS-traffic caused by the file download): http://www.handybibliothek.de/index.wml

Qioo says on its web site that it has 15 titles on line right now, of which 5 are "free" (the ubituitous Alice and 4 others) and 10 are "advertising supported". 

Presumably more titles will actually go online under a PG label soon; no sign of them yet on the main PG site.  I went to the Qioo site which has more than 15 titles, most of which are in German, and downloaded the "Luther-Thesen" for my Blackberry (about 35k), which downloaded within about a minute.  Now I have one more application on my phone to run.  I ran it, it loaded in about another minute, and it came up with an instruction screen in German which I didn't completely understand.  Some amount of directed button-mashing later and I get "Uncaught exception: java.util.EmptyStackException".

I'm willing to believe that it might work, but frankly for my time I'd rather have an "electronic book" that's simply an HTML page that's conservatively formatted so that it works on my phone's browser and a bunch of plausible browsers similar to it.  Enough people have done this already that it's not rocket surgery.

Posted at 03:23 PM in Kindle, Mobile Library |

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