[Touch Pro2, Tilt 2 Themes and Apps] randy.andrade:
Greetings,

Been trying to get into e-reading on the tp2 for a little while, now, and only this morning have felt I've successfully gotten myself situated. Guess having a kidlet get up for a 3:30am potty trip only to not be able to fall asleep again +can+ sometimes have a positive output after all, hehe..

In any case, I've been following this thread since I have a collection of PDFs that I have wanted to read on the TP2 at bedtime, but found Adobe's ReaderLE to be absolutely horrendous for the task, but I didn't have any idea on where to start looking for an alternative.

I took a peek at a couple of the things mentioned here, but wasn't interested in spending $$ for software that I didn't know would work for me, personally. I looked at uBook (still not sure if that's supposed to be pronounced "Ewe-Book" or, as would be technically correct, "Mu-Book", or for the mathematically inclined among us, "Pico-Book", but that's another discussion, entirely..) and Freda, and wanted desperately to fall hopelessly in love with the latter, as Fortunz apparently has.

So far, though, Freda has dissapointed, almost completely. The +promise+ is there, but I haven't been able to use it to open a single Calibre-converted ebook, in any format (epub, pdb, txt) successfully. It manages to open one or two line "readme.txt" or "downloaded from" type text files well enough, but it seems that even a plain-text file that's of any significant size causes it to error out and crash.

My discovery this morning, though, was that mobipocket reader seems to also be free. I'm not sure why I thought it was a $$-only product, but I was dead wrong. I was able to download a .cab directly from mobipocket.com, (which is now sitting in my XDA_UC folder, tyvm! ;) ), and they even have a desktop version which will allow you to sync ebooks from one device (desktop or handheld) to the other. Again: Install the desktop client, install the WinMo client, connect the TP2 to your computer, and MobiReader on the Desktop automagically "finds" the mobile client, and asks if you want to add the device to your computer. You say yes, and from then on out can actually manage both ebook collections from one UI on your PC.

Even better, though, is the mobireader client on the TP2. It allows you to customize the colouring (my current theme is black background, bright-ish blue text, very easy on the eyes, especially in dim light) and even the menu bar, allowing you to completely eliminate the "traditional" WinMo softkeys, as someone mentioned earlier, in favour of a much more useful (imho) touch-sensitive toolbar, allowing you to even select the specific buttons shown. I'm running 7ppc's TP2 rom, which is one of the better 6.5.3 flavours, and have mobireader's menu bar at the bottom of the screen, showing just a "menu" "library" "previous" "next" and the ubiquitous "screen-keyboard" button at the far right. When reading in portrait mode, this provides an incredibly flexible and efficient reading layout, since you can still access anything else via the "menu" button, and it allows the "previous page" and "next page" buttons to have decent toolbar real-estate which makes them very finger-friendly. And for those among us who are more inclined, it also features a "tap-screen-to-turn-page" functionality, if you prefer to use the "full-screen" mode, although I've found it so far unnecessary, since with the "Use Windows Mobile 2005 Soft Keys" option cleared, even the bottom "start-button / softkey" curtain is gone, with the toolbar in it's place. And like I said before, as far as I can tell, it's still FREE.

I have to say, though, that although the Calibre suggestion was spot on. It's INCREDIBLE! I've found it's MetaData and Cover Downloading to be SOOOO cool. And although (as I believe someone pointed out / complained about) it doesn't have the ability to use "Categories" per se, (or was that Freda they were talking about?) you can easily assign Tags for Category-type use, and it has the SUPER-USEFUL "Series" functionality! You can keep track of not only which series a book belongs in, but also which book number (aka read-order) any given title is, which is also useful for keeping track of which series books you have, and which you have yet to get. At a glance, for example, you could tell that you had Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series books 1-3, 5 & 6, and 8-12, telling you which ones you still needed.

So far, I have Calibre converting from PDF / anything to PDBs, and MobiReader on the TP2 for reading. This is making for one +very+ happy geekboy with a severe case of the "other kind of mondays"; the ones that happen all too rarely, where you start the week off on a really GOOD foot. ;)

oh, and fwiw, anyone who's also a K-Cup fanatic, 8oz of Coffee People's "Jet Fuel" + 4oz half & half = one yummy latte!

And STILL only about $0.55 / cup! ;)

x.