eTexts for PDAs

Finding, creating, and reading e-books for your PDA (Palm, Handspring...)

This page is an overview of etexts. How to read on your PDA, how to convert texts into ebooks, and where to find etexts and ebooks.

You can read books and novels on your PDA. Of course, it's easier to read a paper book, but PDAs have their advantages: you can carry twenty or thirty novels in your PDA, it always remembers what page you were at, and you can read anytime, anywhere.

Advantages of eTexts:

• Depending on your PDA's available memory, you can carry quite a few books on your PDA. Many books are only 100 KB large, so one megabyte of RAM can hold ten books.
• You can rotate the display to let you hold the PDA with the up/down buttons on the left or right.
• Book readers remember your place, so if you switch to another program, you return and it opens at the same spot where you left. You can switch to another book or go away for a month; it remembers where you left.
• You can set your PDA to glow in the dark with illuminated text, which lets you read in total darkness. No need for a night light; no bother for anyone else.

eText or eBook?

Some people use the term "ebook," but not every document is a book. It can be as short as a single poem, an essay, and so on.

Contents

• Reader Software: What you need to read ebooks on your PDA...
• eBook Creator Software: Make ebooks for your PDA...
• 40,000 Books Online: Where to find ebooks...
• What to Read: Novels of the 1800s
• Beaming eTexts: Swap eTexts...

To read an ebook, you need reader software. These are simple little programs that let you select an ebook and then read it.

Each one has unique features, so try all of them. Explore the features and find the reader you like best, and then delete the other readers.

You can find a long list of readers at:

• palmtops.about.com/gadgets/palmtops/cs/palmreaders/index.htm

I use CSpotRun. Easy to use and free. www.32768.com/bill/palmos/cspotrun/index.html

It's fairly simple to convert a text into an etext. Here's a quick overview.

1. You can use any Word or ASCII document. A novel, a short business document, a laundry list, etc. If your document is in another format (PageMaker, Quark, Frame, etc.,) convert it into ASCII.
2. The source text should be in ASCII format. This is plain text, so no underlining, no bold, no italics, no formatting. Everything appears left-justified. The only "formatting" that you can do is double space for paragraph breaks and ALL CAPS for headings.
3. After you convert the document into ASCII, use a book creation program, such as BigDoc, to save it as a PBD (Palm Data Base format) file. Start the book creation program, open the ASCII file, glance over it for any final changes, and save it in PBD format with a new title.
4. In your desktop computer's file selector, double-click the PBD file to add it to the list of files to be copied into your PDA upon the next sync.
5. The reader software recognizes that the file is a text and displays it in your list of available etexts. Start your PDA, open the reader software, and from the list of documents, select your etext.

Using BigDoc to Create an etext...

I use BigDoc. Easy to use and free. http://visionary2000.com/bigdoc/. Note: in order to read your ebook, you must first add a etext reader, such as CSpotRun (http://www.32768.com/bill/palmos/cspotrun/index.html.) If you don't install a reader, you won't be able to see your ebook.

1. Open the document in Word and clean it up. This means: convert the entire document into the same style: no headers, no bold, no italic, and so on.
2. Separate every paragraph with double carriage returns. (you can do this by replacing single carriage returns with double carriage returns.)
3. It's useful to change headings into ALL CAPITALIZATION.
4. If the document is long, you may also want to include a table of contents at the beginning.
5. Save the file by using Save As... and select Save as type... Text only (*.txt)
6. Open a file manager and open Big Doc.
7. Drag the file and drop it into Big Doc.
8. Scroll down to be sure that it looks okay. There are often extra empty spaces at the end that you can delete.
9. Use Save as... and save the file as a pdb (Palm Database) file.
10. Doubleclick on the file and it will be installed in your PDA upon the next synchronization.
11. Open your etext reader (such as CSpotRun) and select the etext from its menu.

There are perhaps 100,000 etexts on the net: books, documents, maps, etc. Some of the following collections have links to more collections.

Very few ebooks are available in PDB format, but that's only because if people have converted them, they haven't made the conversions available. You can convert them yourself.

Avoid the temptation to convert into PBD format and delete the ASCII text. PDAs may be hot at the moment, but ASCII format has been around for twenty years, and it's certain that we will use ASCII twenty years from now, whereas it's also certain that whatever PDA format we use today, it will be obsolete in a few years. So if you're creating a worthwhile document, save it in both PDA and ASCII format, and make it available in both.

Similarly, be careful with the DOC format for etexts. DOCs are not the same as Word doc format. It's popular for PDAs, but it's not an open format.

The following are in no particular order.

• Project Gutenberg. 13,000 etexts in ASCII at Gutenberg.org. Project Gutenberg started the first collection of etexts.
• Carnegie-Mellon. 29,000 etexts at english-www.hss.cmu.edu/.
• Humanities Text Initiative (HTI). University of Michigan. An umbrella organization for the creation, delivery, and maintenance of electronic texts. HTML, in a single file. hti.umich.edu/. List of etexts at hti.umich.edu/english/pd-modeng/bibl.html.
• Online Books Page at University of Pennsylvania. 20,000 etexts. Various formats, incl. links to other e-libraries, incl. Gutenberg. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/. The Archives has links to many collections, incl. many languages. digital.library.upenn.edu/books/archives.html.
• Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts. American literature, English literature, and Western philosophy. 133 authors and 1,000 etexts. ASCII. Automatically creates a Palm prc file. sunsite.berkeley.edu/alex/.
• Perseus Project at Tufts University. perseus.tufts.edu/. Digital library of the ancient world, with texts in Greek, Latin, heiroglyphics, plus other languages.
• Bibliomania. 2,000 etexts. HTML, in separate chapters. bibliomania.com/.
• NetLibrary. 4,000 etexts. For reading on PCs (not PDAs.) Cumbersome checkout procedure, plus user registration, etc. legacy.netlibrary.com.
• Bartleby.com. HTML. Sells etexts. Copy and convert to ASCII. Bartleby.com.
• Internet Public Library (IPL) 20,000 etexts. SMGL, many chapters. Easy to convert to ASCII. Strip out the SMGL. Internet Public Library.
• gopher://wiretap.area.com/11/Books
• Free-Ebooks.net
• EbookDirectory.com
• Memoware.com
• University of Virginia's collection at etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/
• e-book.com.au in Australia
• PlanetPDF.com

At the end of the 1800s, various lists were compiled of what was considered the best novels of the 1800s. Literary tastes have changed; some very famous 19th century novels are scarcely known today, most of the authors are completely unknown. This list is alphabetical by author's last name.

For whatever reason, Palm OS does not let you beam etexts directly. No problem. Use Zarf's Catalog (Z'catalog) to beam any file from your PDA. Fetch it for free on the web.

• http://www.eblong.com/zarf/zcatalog.html

• ebooknet.com: For more about etexts and so on.

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