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Cell Phone as e-Book Reader (in Japan) 136

Posted by timothy from the doubles-as-a-vision-test dept.
aussie_a writes "Reading books on your cell phone has become the latest feature in Japan. With games, e-mails and the news already standard features, the Japanese cell-phone is more then just a phone. Novels are downloaded in segments and are run as Java-based applications on the phone. But users can do much more then just read the book, they are able to search for books, write reviews and send fan mail to the authors."
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Cell Phone as e-Book Reader (in Japan) More

Cell Phone as e-Book Reader (in Japan)

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  • Good For Scrolls (Score:4, Informative)

    by pressesc ( 873084 ) on Sunday April 03, 2005 @02:02PM (#12127279) Homepage
    This [pressesc.com] is how the story lead would appear on a cell phone. Is it good for anything but Haiku?

    • Re:Good For Scrolls (Score:2, Interesting)

      by kagelump ( 812908 )
      Has it occrred to
      anyone that
      japanese characters
      are ideograms and
      takes up about
      two english
      letters on a
      cell phone?
      (same applys
      to chinese,
      korean, etc)
      • Never thought of that. How Alphabet minded we are!

      • set @pedantic = 1 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by kahei ( 466208 ) on Sunday April 03, 2005 @02:37PM (#12127482) Homepage


        Korean characters are not ideograms, except when they borrow chinese ones for names and hard words. They're phonetic, and a very elegant system it is -- or was, until the inevitable blurring and decay.

        They were founded on Confucian principles -- 'male' sounds stick up and 'female' sounds lie passively underneath them. Gotta love that Confucianism @_@

        Japanese characters are often ideograms, but to be honest the text is no more than maybe 1.5 times the density of English, for colloquial dialog. I think the key might be that the users are train passengers reading pulp novels, so that:


        1 -- there isn't room to open a book


        2 -- you don't really need to backtrack and appreciate the structure and rhythm :)

        • sorry, what i meant is that they're all squares

          I'm chinese, studying Japanese, and all I know about Korean is what they post up on wikimedia
          • All Korean, used to be in Chinese characters until the 1500s. Legend has it that the Korean alphabet was based on images left on leaves or something. All Korean alphabets can be drawn with a circle, lines or a box. In Korean, for each syllable there is one "character" which is a series of alphabets. For example damsa. Imagine 'd' 'a' and 'm' occupying the same space as one character, and s and a occupying the next space. So you have a five spaces in english, occupying 2 spaces in korean. For Japanese, it w
            • Legend has it that the Korean alphabet was based on images left on leaves or something.

              Legend? I thought it was pretty much accepted that the King Sejong commissioned creation of Korean alphabet, which changed only in minor aspects over 400 years.

              Now, granted, there were other attempts to devise a Korean writing system (including something called Yidoo, which is nothing more than using Chinese characters in phonetic fasion, I believe), and creation of Hangeul was probably nothing like coming up with so

    • Re:Good For Scrolls (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ceeam ( 39911 )
      First - it depends on a phone, of course. Width of about ~150..200px is probably where it starts to be comfortable. Second - this is how they teach you fast reading - by using text in narrow columns so that your eyes don't need to move left-right scanning the lines. Third - they used a pretty interesting writing system there in Japan you know.

      BTW - reading on Palm is a sheer pleasure for me now (I've read several rather big books in the last couple of months). Beats paper books all the time. With RTA-like

      • I guess something similar should exist for smartphones too. Why not?
        It does. It is called a web browser, and almost all color screen phones have one.

    • Re:Good For Scrolls (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's how english text would look like on a cell phone; kanji doesn't use that much space.

    • No, THIS is how they look like (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ag0ny ( 59629 ) <javi@lavand[ ]a.net ['eir' in gap]> on Sunday April 03, 2005 @03:02PM (#12127612) Homepage
      I happen to have a few phone catalogs here. I have just scanned a page on a DoCoMo catalog showing the screens (and font sizes) on the latest phone models.

      The image is here [ag0ny.com]. This is a 1Mbyte JPEG file, be warned.

      As you can see, this is more than enough to read a book, specially if it's written in Japanese.
      • Just as a note to anyone who doesn't read Japanese, and thus cannot appreciate how densely packed the information is, the first nine characters (including the comma!) basically say "this weekend at the zoo" (23 characters).

        I'd translate more, but the right half of the text is not shown.
    • "This is how the story lead would appear on a cell phone. Is it good for anything but Haiku?"

      I don't exactly have a top-of-the-line phone here, but I read the news on it all the time. I'd prefer a PocketPC, but this'd do in a pinch.
  • Man, that would take forever to read on my little old Nokia 3390. I can see like 10 letters per line, and a whopping 5 lines of text per screen.

    Maybe good for a Haiku, but that's it...
    • i do this already. i wrote a small java midlet which allows me to read ebooks on my mobile. it only has around 750k so the size of a book is limited but its still real handy when ur stuck in some reletives house with nothing to do. there are also plenty of midlets available online which allow you to do this.

  • mistakes (Score:2, Interesting)

    by alatesystems ( 51331 )
    I know that some day the paid editors will edit, but until then:
    "the Japanese cell-phone is more then just a phone" -- should be than

    In any case, that's lame that it runs as a J2ME app. I read stuff right now on my phone, and it's straight html and you can actually work with it, where the Jap J2ME apps are probably drm'ed to hell and back.

    I'll stick with my html, and there are plenty of PDF to html converters.
    • "the Japanese cell-phone is more then just a phone" -- should be than"

      Or: "The Japanese cell phone is more! Then: just a phone"

    • Re:mistakes (Score:3, Insightful)

      by glesga_kiss ( 596639 )
      Yah, this article is a few years out of date. There have been eBook readers available on mobiles for several years. I've read maybe 10 different books cover to cover on mine.
      • IMO, the "news" aspect of it isn't the technology per se, but the fact that it's actually catching on. Surprising.

        • IMO, the "news" aspect of it isn't the technology per se, but the fact that it's actually catching on. Surprising.
          No doubt. Most everybody I suggest this to seems to want to convince me of the virtues of paper. But people believe what they are used to is always the best thing...

          I suppose this is just more proof that Japanese people are more open to new technology than Westerners.

    • In any case, that's lame that it runs as a J2ME app. I read stuff right now on my phone, and it's straight html and you can actually work with it, where the Jap J2ME apps are probably drm'ed to hell and back.

      Jup, but these J2ME apps allow some e-book reading enhancements like auto-scrolling and such.

  • Old News (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Story dated March 18. They're using Tamagotchi now.

  • To small? (Score:4, Informative)

    by vidarlo ( 134906 ) <vidarlo@bitsex.net> on Sunday April 03, 2005 @02:08PM (#12127315) Homepage
    Interesting discussion. [slashdot.org]

    I think that a mobile phone will have far to small screen. Even if you have a 7" screen, you can't display more than a few lines of text at once! A book has superior resolution, no expiry date, can lend it away and such. I see none of those features on a mobile phone.

    The day we can have a a5-sized sheet of e-paper, with a small 20g heavy data module, then maybe can e-books take off. But a book is something everyone know, it's universally, needs nothing but light, and works fine.

    • Re:To small? (Score:2, Informative)

      by FRiC ( 416091 )
      Reading e-books have been quite common in China and Japan for a long time. Unlike languages that have to be spelled out, Chinese characters take up much less space and don't have to be word wrapped or hyphenated. Having a small display isn't a problem at all.
      • Yes and no. Kanji can take up smaller space but as they become more complicated they also become more difficult to read when they get smaller. Many kanji can appear very similar or indistinquishable if they are too small. Also many Japanese words or grammatical elements do not have kanji, so they must be spelled out with hiragana or katakana and can be longer. And worse, because Japanese doesnt use spaces to separate words, elements of a single word can be wrapped.

      • Unlike languages that have to be spelled out, Chinese characters take up much less space and don't have to be word wrapped or hyphenated.

        Okay, I am starting to get tired of this argument now. Yes, Chinese characters are more efficient than Roman ones. Yes, they communicate more information per given space. This does not matter. English is still readable on a cell phone. I have been reading books for over a year and a half on two cell phones using Opera. It is more than a little readable. In fac

    • Re:To small? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Even if you have a 7" screen, you can't display more than a few lines of text at once!

      Do you always set your font size to 50pt? Most phones these days give your a very comfortable newspaper-like column to look at.

      A book has superior resolution

      True, so why don't you print out your web pages before reading them to take advantage of 600dpi or whatever your printer is capable of?

      no expiry date

      Stick to txt - there are plenty of works available in plain txt.

      can lend it away and such

      To borrow a phras
    • Maybe american phones will have too small a screen, but you seem to be several years behind the rest of the world in that respect. Japan seems to be several years ahead of the rest of the world.

      My phone is basically a PDA with a wireless modem inside it. It has a similar sized screen to an IPAQ. I can get a pretty reasonable amount of text on the screen, certainly enough to make it useable. And with my 1GB memory card, I can carry pretty much an entire bookcase around in my pocket.

      • Also, while the idea that Japanese cellphones are vastly technologically superior to phones everywhere else was true 5 years ago, there is less and less that is incredibly amazing about Japanese cell phones. Now that everyone has color screens and can use their cellphones to connect to the Internet and pretty cellphones are being sold outside of Japan, file transfer speed is probably the only advantage. Truthfully, I was disappointed the last time I went to Japan.

        Large screen cellphones are available

    • I have a Sharp v402SH phone

      http://www.vodafone.jp/english/products/kisyu/v402 sh/index.html [vodafone.jp]

      distributed by Vodafone. My phone allows reading of e-books. I just recently figured out how to find the hidden folder (it's on the mini SD card in Kanji, so I had to sprinkle files here and there and put the card back into my phone and then drill into e-Books until the file showed up in a list.

      Here is how my text appears, 7 words across 13 lines down.

      ----------

      Perhaps if the whole DVD region encoding
      scheme
    • Not at all. I've been reading books from my phone for over 2 years, using ReadM first on a 7650 and now MobiPocket on a 6630 (I prefer ReadM but sadly it doesnt seem to work on the 6630). I just convert the book to html and run it through pyrite publisher and bluetooth the book to my phone. If you like scifi and fantasy the Baen free library (www.baen.com) is a great place to get books to try this out. You stop noticing the small screen pretty quickly and become immersed in the story. Turning pages is less
    • You might be surprised.

      I have a big library (~3 bookcases' worth of novels, short stories, &c) on my Psion 5mx, and even on its 640x240, 5.5"x2" screen, I find reading novels perfectly comfortable. It's true you need to 'turn the page' more often than a dead-tree book, but when that just involves pressing the space bar or tapping the screen, it's really not an issue. You can choose font and size, of course, and with the backlight you can read in bed with the lights off!

      Of course, a very small scre

  • Going blind... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 03, 2005 @02:08PM (#12127316)
    You are on screen 3 of 1,490,548,734 of the Great Gatsby.

    *previous page* *next page*
  • Phones also make poor anal sextoys.

    http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_207728.html?m enu=news.quirkies [ananova.com]
  • I for one, look foward to reading Tolkien in this kind of format:

    "In a ho"
    le in the gr
    (then I thumb the arrow button)
    ound lived a "
    hobbit.

    I figure my thumb will implode by the time the poor dwarves get taunted at Rivendell.

    • One file to hold them all, one phone to deploy them,

      One number to buy them all and in your commute enjoy them.
    • i wholeheartedly agree with you. it is going to make the reading of books so annoying. i thought PDAs were bad enough!
    • I figure my thumb will implode by the time the poor dwarves get taunted at Rivendell.

      Which is why e-books have auto scroll and/or autopage features; the Palm ebook readers have had auto-scroll for years.

      e-books are convenient. They're difficult to read, but the one thing I found annoying was that it's very hard to flip back in the book to find some reference you might have missed. Like reading Anna Karenina, there's so many people coming and going you have to keep going back to see who all these people
      • but the one thing I found annoying was that it's very hard to flip back in the book to find some reference you might have missed.

        Really? Funny, when I had a Rocket eBook the search function was probably the most useful feature. "Bob? Who's Bob?" *Search upwards for Bob* "Oh, thats who!" Click return to bookmark.

        No more flipping pages for me!

        Of course if you dropped it you were out $300, so I can see why it never caught on ;)
    • If that's your cell's screen size.... Does it have rotary dialer?
    • I actually read the Lord of the Rings for the first time entirely on my iPaq 3760 and found it quite enjoyable.

      I have since replaced it and my Samsung A620 cellphone with a Treo 600 smarth phone and I'm currently on book 9 of 10 of Roger Zelazny's Amber series.

      I prefer reading on my PDA now as it's so much more convenient.
  • ...Slashdot editors do cliché posts too?

    (Although it should probably be "Cell Phone as e-Book Reader...in Japan!")

    Seriously, are these e-Books PDFs? If so I can probably write mine in XSL-FO [w3.org], use FOP [apache.org] to make one of these, and then see my work on cellphones. That'd be sweet.
  • Techie that I am, I still can't bring myself to read books on a computer screen. This sounds like a good idea, but there's something better about a paper book. The battery never needs to be charged, you don't have to squint to look at a tiny cell phone screen, and you don't need any expensive equipment to read it.
    • Sony had some really cool electronic paper [gizmodo.com] (there was a story on /.) that offers the best of both worlds (or at least could, would probably need a revision or two), it offers high resolution, you only need power to switch pages not to keep them displayed and IIRC it also had some nifty mechanism to fast forward through books.

      Of course it's Sony, so it's locked down with DRM and a proprietary format noone else uses but as they apparently have changed their ways recently (They opened up Blu-Ray and it even s

      • better link [guardian.co.uk] (This link is actually from the article in my first post, should have read it before posting =)

        Offers much more information, for example:

        One much-repeated fallacy about the Librie is that power is used only for turning pages. While it is true that the "ink" particles stay in position without consuming power, the electronic innards do drain the juice, hence the inclusion of a standby mode. Nevertheless, the three AAA batteries used to power the Librie should stretch to an impressive 10,000 page

      • that offers the best of both worlds (or at least could, would probably need a revision or two)

        Your parenthetical comment is spot on -- the Librie's display technology is certainly something to watch, but the Librie itself sucks.

        The display is very slow to update, which is theoretically fine for a book, but Sony doesn't seem to have taken this into account at all when designing the user-interface -- it's constantly trying to display conventional GUI elements ... slooooooowly (imagine how frustrating menus
    • After reading a few books on my PDA (Palm Tungsten E), I've found paper-books to be extremely annoying. They're just so big and bulky. You have to have two hands to read them (not that my other hand is doing anything important while reading, I don't read THOSE sort of novels) and you can't lie on your side (I lie on one side for one page, then it's difficult to read the other page, PDA's only have one "page").

      Having said that, reading on a cell-phone is insane.
  • I am shocked this has not been done before , i think it is the definition of ingenius ,, so simple yet so brilliant.
    an online serachable library that you can pick and choose from on the train or in the park .The way mobile phones are heading with increased screen size and memory not to forget the dropping costs it is only natural that it swallows the Ebook market.The only problem i would have with this would be if i were not able to back up the books to my computer , though that may not be an issue if it h
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • a) portable

      My phone is more portable than a book, plus I've always got it with me. I think there are 3/4 books on it right now. Handy for 10 min killing waiting for a taxi/bus etc.

      c) made out of recyclable materials

      That phrase always makes me laugh. So what if something is recyclable? How is that any good for anyone? Toilet paper is recyclable, but you don't see folk putting it in a special coloured bin. Books should be passed on and not disposed of anyway, though perhaps that's what you meant.

      Plus

    • Of course, millions of people will end up getting these book-phones anyway if only for the sake of looking cool and impressing their friends (designer nike shoes,anyone?) If this encourages people to read (books as opposed to glossy trashy magazines), even if it is motivated by being cool and impressing their friends, then I'm all for it. Personally I doubt it will replace books. I've had an ebook reader on my nokia 7610 since I got the phone and find it a deeply fustrating experience. There's something sat

  • Only in US... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ceeam ( 39911 ) on Sunday April 03, 2005 @02:12PM (#12127336)
    ... this is news.
  • My cell-phone has 320-240 resolution, more than adequate for reading, especially if the fonts where anti-aliased and well designed. BUT the interface totally sucks currently. Perhaps if it had a couple of easy to use scroll wheels that made scrolling through text a breeze, and you could choose to view in windscreen vs. the default portrait by holding it sideways, then we can talk about reading on your cell-phone.

    Still might be nice to have for when standing in line somewhere and you've forgotten to bring a novel or magazine.

    I assume someday soon cell-phones will be powerful enough to transcribe voice accurately enough that you could navigate around on the net reasonably enough or even get some work done.

    This does give me an idea for making a cell-phone friendly version for people reading my Blogs.

  • I'm really not sure I could put up with reading on a cell phone sized screen, but I did fulfil a longstanding promise to a friend to read the Book of John, and I managed it on the bus, on the train etc., using my Palm Vx.

    The essentials are a decent legible font and the ability to save plenty of bookmarks.

    In this case, the Vx made it easier to find time to read in traveling or other situations when I wouldn't normally be carrying an actual book.

  • Bah (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nexzus ( 673421 ) on Sunday April 03, 2005 @02:15PM (#12127354)
    I would imagine that anyone with a Smartphone or Treo does this already.

    I've got an iPaq 6315, and one of the reasons I purchased it was to read E-books on my way to work. I used to use a old Palm to do the same thing, but I like the screen on the iPaq more, and it's one less gadget to carry around.
    • Kinda the same here: I use my trusty T3 for ebooks...isilo for straight text, repligo for pdf. Being able to easily read a book one handed (no page flipping) and carry along at least ten books (+reference books, dictionaries etc) have actually made me prefer my palmpilot to normal books (except for textbooks).

      Still, I prefer my cellphone as a seperate entity...it's so much handier for when I need to relay information to someone on the other end of the phone.

  • So what? (Score:1, Troll)

    by MikTheUser ( 761482 )
    What's the freaking news?

    Cell phones can do just about anything now, and a little more. They should rather explain why they still call them "phones"...

  • (In Japan) (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Andy Gardner ( 850877 )
    Hmm ive been doing this since 2002 on my old Nokia 7650. I mostly use eBook reader [my-symbian.com]eBook reader for Symbian phones now on a 6600. There are loads of document readers/editors available from .pdf to MS word. I guess as the article says "Such times could be just around the corner in the United States, where cell phones are become increasingly used for relaying data, including video, digital photos and music.". Oh wait this is already available worldwide.
    • I wish you provide more info (even submit story) about that freaking Librie thing from Sony. Are we finally speaking about actual ebook here?

      http://www.eink.com/news/releases/pr70.html [eink.com]

      Its in my list and not giving up my 7650 just like you of course :)

      Also there is a chance that whoever (Reuters,AP?) got that story to whole World is speaking about that device.

  • It seems obvious to me how this would work best (Score:4, Interesting)

    by saskboy ( 600063 ) on Sunday April 03, 2005 @02:28PM (#12127432) Homepage Journal
    Instead of relying on a screen to visually read the eBook, you already have a built-in private speaker in the earpiece, and could give voice commands to the software to read the next page, resume, go-back, or pause. The only concern then is not to interfere with the phone's ability to take a call, and battery life might be impacted more, but a text-to-speech eBook phone could be the next big thing.

    Handsfree would be an asset, as holding the phone up to your ear for that long might be tiring, or if you're stupid enough to drive and use one, cause accidents.
    • Have you actually tried to listen to a book using current text-to-speech technology? I tried converting a book from project gutenberg to audio, but it pronounced words so inaccruately with a tone so irritating that I could not bear to listen to it after a few minutes.

      Downloading entire books read by a human in an audio format isn't practical either, as audio files that long tend to be several hundred megabytes, and flash media isn't exactly cheap either.

    • Good idea... as an alternative. You're talking about audio books really, but I can't listen to audio books for the life of me. I'll pay attention to the first paragraph or two and then my mind wanders off, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels like this. The problem is that the writing style used for reading isn't ideal for listening. The same way you can't take a book and translate it literally to a movie, you can't just read it out-loud for the best result. You must transform it to a storytelling mo
    • "but a text-to-speech eBook phone could be the next big thing"

      You know...I hate to burst your bubble, but there's this thing called "audio books" where you can listen to recordings of people reading your books. There's also a website called Audible.com that lets you download these for your iPod.

  • Good to know that i am ahead of Japanese :D I read e-books on my SonyEricsson P900 since purchasing it last year.
  • "We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notices pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books." - Douglas Adams

  • wow (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's a good feeling when you've been doing something for 2 years and now it's finally becoming the 'latest' thing in Japan. I've had my Nokia 3650 since when it first came out in the spring of 2003 and have read many novel-sized books on it using the excellent ReadM [zavorine.net] software for symbian. It supports several formats but my most favorite is txt.gz. At about 1k per page, you can fit a lot of books even on the standard 16MB card.
    All Series 60 phones have 176x208 screen which fits about 70-80 English words - no
  • I read both the Lord of the Rings trilogy and several of the Harry Potter books on my Siemens SX1 handset using the readm http://zavorine.net/symbian/readm.htm [zavorine.net] ebook reader (and yes I bought the books first to pay licenses). The screen is definitely big enough and if the story is good enough who cares that it's not on paper? Especially with a decent auto-scroll.

    Why did I do this? Because it lets me store and read when I'm travelling, at airports, train stations, everywhere I'm hanging around. And no bulgy
  • I don't wanna get blind, my CRT is doing a good enough job making sure that'll happen soon anyway.
  • The Japanese language makes a lot of things like this possible, or at least a lot easier than in other languages. In Japanese, it doesn't take as many characters to describe a sentence as it does, for example, in English. (This is one of the reasons all kinds of IM 1337 5p33k has developed, like "c u l8er" or "brb".) This means that the small screens on cell phones are large enough to facilitate many innovative uses.

    Here in the United States, people seem more content to haul around laptops, like this Powerb

    • While your general point is correct, this sentence fills up the entirety of a Japanese telephone display (two displays, if you try it in English). Without scrolling you get about 50 characters on my model -- Japanese consumes them at roughly 60% of the rate of English depending on topic and linguistic choices (to l33t, or not to l33t, that I believe is the question). You aren't going to be reading book-length texts on your keitai anytime soon. And, dear Lordy, they'd kill you with the expense -- I pay 1/
  • I routinely read books on my Nokia 6600, while on the bus, or waiting etc. I convert them into txt and read with ReadM - free text reader.

  • In Russia (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, reading books off the cell phone became quite widespread in Russia, too. Especially, given the fact that there is a *tons* of russian books on the internet.

    Have a look at http://bookshelf.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] if you need a book reader for your cell phone.
  • I didnt the scoop, darn! Anyways... I was thinking the same thing, how the hell could read all of that, that's impossible for me. But also, wouldn't this lead to alot of accidents. I mean the women looks like she's walking while reading. What would happen if you all the sudden were walking in a crosswalk when it turned green. It seems more like a safety hazard. Don't make me get started on cars. I expect major pileups someday if this is ever deployed in the US.
  • Well I have a Nokia 6600 and a Motorola V600 and I have been reading books on them for ages. I guess Im ahead of the Japanese on this one.
    With Symbian phones, like the Nokia 6600 there is ReadM. With my V600 I use Tequilacat BookReader. I currently have all the Harry Potter books and all the Hitchhiker's Guide books on my V600, and I really do use it to read, quite often.
  • That girls who date Asian men will have a second use for their magnifying glass now! (sorry, couldn't resist :) Jimmy
  • If you have a PDA phone, like a Treo, you can already do this [ereader.com]. And you don't even need to buy the classics [gutenberg.org].

    I suppose it's kinda neat that non-PDA phones can read books this way, but downloading bits at a time? The way American phone companies gouge you for data usage, fees would pile up quick.

  • Symbian or Java phones have had ebook readers for a while. We published a few posts on the topic (in italian, use babelfish or follow urls) here [mobileblog.it], here [mobileblog.it], and here [mobileblog.it].
  • I already use programs like TiBR [indevsoftware.com] to read textfile novels on my Treo 600. It's a little scrunched, but I don't really notice it; things are probably considerably better on the Treo 650.

    Project Gutenberg has plenty of textfile novels ripe for reading. Cory Doctorow's stuff is also pretty good. I read his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [craphound.com] entirely on my cell.

    Another handy resource is the University of Virginia Library's Etext Center [virginia.edu], which has 1800 freely-available eBooks.
  • The last seven or eight books I've read have been e-books on my phone (Treo 650). And I didn't have to pay per page for it, either: Plucker [plkr.org] plus Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] plus stuff like the Baen Free Library [baen.com] for more recent titles equals a big bookshelf's worth of free-of-charge books in my pocket wherever I go.
  • I have read a couple of books with the free bookreader from Tequilacat:
    http://tequilacat.nm.ru/dev/br/index-en.html [tequilacat.nm.ru]

    Tha small screen makes the reading quite a bit slower than usual. On the other hand it's very handy to have a good book with you anytime you get bored. And there is a lot of free books availible for download on the p2p networks.
  • I dunno about e-book reading, but small screens are perfect for newspapers.

    Think about it: newspapers (printed ones) have narrow columns and short paragraphs. All the important info is at the top of the story. That's the perfect thing to be reading on your cell phone. In fact, that's what I do on my Treo... the first thing I do every morning is sync a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald.

    I reckon that a forward-looking newspaper could sell versions of their newspapers especially for cell phones. However, it
  • Actually I've been doing a lot of research on this topic in the last couple of weeks. The PDA market has basically collapsed in Japan, so I've been planning my move to a portable phone ("keitai denwa" in Japanese, hence the Subject). A few comments and observations:
    1. The hardware is amazing. I'm using a Sanyo device with an amazing range of features. Latest ones I just discovered are the zoom for the camera and the quick switch for image size.
    2. Some models (like Kyocera's) can work as a kind of high speed mo
    • Forgot to mention the big missing feature is handwriting input a la Grafitti. However, when working in Japanese, the predictive input system is quite good, and it greatly reduces the amount of clicking you have to do.

      I feel like going deeper into the list of amazing and weird features it does have...

  • I have been doing this for over a year and a half on both my P800 and my A780. They both have Opera, and I just strip Project Gutenberg [promo.net] eTexts or other [sourceforge.net] books down and break them into chapters. As long as the HTML formatting does not specify width, the page should display fine on any small screen. (The script I use is at SourceForge [sourceforge.net]).

    This can be done on any phone or PDA that has any kind of web browser. Even PocketIE can handle simple pages (although it cannot use CSS and it loads pages slowly). Thi

  • your celliphone doesn't have a screen???

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