Part One of the Review | Reviews Home | Communicator Home

In the second part of this review I concentrate on the most important part of the program - the actual Reader itself. While most programs offer only this function eBookReader offers other, but does this let down the reader? Not at all. This is the best eBook Reader I have used anywhere. There are a few feature it might have, but overall it has more than any other reader I've used.

The reader has a book mark feature that works very well. Bookmarks can be used to quickly and easily navigate around long documents. For example you could set them up so there was one at the beginning of each chapter.

Bookmarks can be added by using the appropriate menu entry or pressing Shift+Control+A. The programs guesses what you will want to call the bookmark and its quite intelligent about it , here we can see that the appropriate text has been selected without any action on my part.

You can then use Ctrl+B to bring up a list of bookmarks which you can then select using the arrow keys and then use return to jump to that bookmarks. You are also able to rename and delete the bookmarks from this screen. Bookmarks are a powerful feature of reading long documents and they are often overlooked but here they have been implemented extremely well.

The View menu shows the true power of this program. Some of the options include selecting font and formatting, justified alignment, zooming, line spacing and more.

The Font dialog is particularly powerful and you can choose to view the text in any of the fonts on your Communicator. You can choose the font size and the formatting as well as the colour and several other options (some of which seem a little too much).

In the example above the justified alignment is switched on and the font is Arial in blue. Whatever you find most comfortable to read can be set up. If you use a font on your PC that you find particularly comfortable for reading you should be able to transfer it to your 9210 and use it here.

If you want to make the text bigger you can either choose to use a larger font size but more conveniently you can use the zoom key. Perfect for when you are tired at night and you want the text to be that little bit bigger.

There is also an excellent full screen mode which on the 9210 with its relatively small screen is very welcome. The screen of the 9210 is excellent for reading eBooks because it is very sharp and clear, but also because the pixels per inch are higher than on most desktop monitors. This means that when reading eBooks on the 9210 there should be very little eye strain.

While in full screen mode the command buttons still work to allow easy navigation of the pages (the command button area pops up after clicking so you can see which each one is). In this shot the top titlebar has been turned on.

Also included in a find tool as well as the option to select all and copy. This means you can copy the text out of a eBook file. Since many of the DOC files available are small reference files this is more useful that it might appear. The Go Menu contains the navigation tools which can be used to go to the next page, the previous page, the beginning or end of the file, or a certain % ot the way through it. However I found myself using the Command Buttons for navigation. The navigation system certainly works - it speedy and nice and easy to get at, and while you do not have to turn a page you could consider clicking the button the equivalent.

In the final two screenshots you can see examples of the thought that have gone into the program. A recent file option is provided on the menu to allow quick access to previously read file. Also if you click on the an eBook files in the File Manager it will start the program and open the book at the last viewed page thanks to the file recognisers that are installed with the program.

There are a few thing I would like to see added to eBook Reader, but this is a version 1.20 release and as such it is well featured and polished. It be nice to have an option to have the text display vertically across the screen (i.e. so you could read it like a book). It also be nice to see other formats supported - perhaps text could be added?

eBook Reader is a very impressive program, it is fast and easy to use, it doesn't just let you read eBooks, but manage and store them too. It is the best Reader I have ever used (including those on the PC). It is good value at $19, and the shareware system means you can try it free for 30 days. It has the well known Epocware behind it guaranteeing good support (an example of which is a bug fix was issued in less than 6 hours!). Russ called this a Killer application and he's right this is a must for every 9210 owner interested in reading on their machine.

The program wins an All About ER6 Premier Program Award.

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Notes about eBooks

If you are looking for a program to convert text files to DOC file or to read DOC files on your PC, I can recommend, as a basic starting point, Doc Reader. It is a Windows program available from http://www.geocities.com/mpicker0/DocReader/DocReader.htm for free. Users on other platforms can check the memoware website which has a more comprehensive list of converters and viewers.

If you are looking for DOC files the obvious place to start is http://www.memoware.com which has over 9,000 documents many in DOC format. However there are many other sites which DOC files on some that you have to pay for. I recommend you have a look at the links section of memoware.com.