Every Flavour Beans

Though N800 is an Internet Tablet, it can serve as a very good ebook reader too, for those casual/semi-serious readers who don’t want to invest in a stand-alone ebook reader. At its screen size and resolution, reading ebooks is extremely pleasing on the eye. It supports HTML, PDF, etc formats out of the box; but what truly makes it such a good candidate to be used as an ebook reader is the excellent(read Free) ebook reader software available for it called FBReader.

Install FBReader for N800 with a few simple clicks and you are ready to read ebooks in the following formats in N800: TXT, RTF, CHM, fb 2.1, palmdoc, zTxt, OEB, OpenReader, mobipocket(non-encrypted), etc. For a complete list of supported formats, see FBReader’s about page. Support for tables and stylesheets in the above mentioned formats is lacking; it will be added in the future versions, along with support for more ebook formats.

FBReader can read the files of above mentioned formats directly from a compressed archive too, the supported compression formats being zip, gzip(.gz) and bzip2(.bz2). It remembers the last read position of all the files opened earlier for reading. But support for adding manual bookmarks or annotations is missing(planned for the next version). More features: Any images embedded in the documents are displayed; text search is supported; allows switching between portrait and landscape modes while reading(in fact supports all rotations in 90 degree increments); there is no inbuilt dictionary in the software and can’t easily fix the mis-spelled words either.

Visual Tour of FBReader for N800

The following screenshots should give a glimpse into some of the important features of FBReader i.e. N800’s ebook reading capabilities.

1. The default reading mode in FBReader is the landscape mode. Fewer lines are visible and needs frequent eye movement too but I can access the (scrolling) buttons on N800 more comfortably.
   
2. Portrait mode is more comfortable for reading but scrolling down is very uncomfortable to me in this position. The lines look really short when the font size is increased(or zoomed-in using N800’s button) but FBReader still wraps the words correctly.
   
3. Searching for books to add them to the FBReaders library is a confusing process: It doesn’t show the file structure similar to N800’s File Manager. It took me some time to find the books in /media/mmc1/ebooks folder. Once added, the book remains easily accessible from FBReader’s library.
   
4. Text search feature is one of my favourites and I end up using it quite often. Also, in the wake of absence of bookmarks, I use text search to jump from one place in the document to the other, provided I remember a few words from those contexts.
   
5. FBReader has a lot of options that can be customised. General options can be seen in the screenshot below. The paths specified in Book Path field never worked for me but you can always give it a try!
   
6. Change the size/colour/style of the text font from the “Styles” tab.
   

More information

A detailed review of N800’s ebook reading capabilities and related issues is available onTeleread. The same blog has a post on ten easy tips for Nokia N800 ebook users using FBReader, also available as a pdf for taking a printout.

N800 + FBReader/Web Browser + Plucker makes a great combination, I will that for a later post.

Discussion threads on N800 as an ebook reader:
FBReader Google Group
MobileRead Forums
Internet Tablet Talk

Some websites from where you can download ebooks for free(I will try to add more in future):
Gutenberg
Manybooks
Mobileread EBooks
20+ Places for Public Domain E-Books (Somebody else seems to have done the work for me)