Take a Good Book With You
On Your PC Companion!

This great software lets you read books and listen to audio books on your H/PC or Palm-size PC. Check out the sources for commercial and copyright-free electronic books.

BY RICH HALL

Sometimes I get fed up with the word "productivity," especially when I'm traveling. After driving a couple of hours to catch a flight, sitting a few more hours in a coach airline seat designed for Mr. Skinny, spending the night in a hotel room (I NEVER get to sleep before 1:00 a.m. in a hotel room), and trudging around the exhibit floor of a computer show, the last thing I want to do is be productive. I want to relax a little, to unwind, have some fun.

To be completely honest, my first choice is not my PC Companion. If I'm in New York, I'll go catch a Broadway show. Chicago has a lot of excellent restaurants. And I imagine I could find something to do in London or Tokyo. But there are moments, waiting to board an aircraft, waiting for a taxi cab, or waiting (a long time) to go to sleep in a hotel room, when a little instant, mindless diversion is needed. And since I'm already carrying my PC Companion, why not have it do double duty.

Opening up a good book

One of the things I always do before boarding a flight is go to the airport gift shop and look for a fat novel about airplane disasters. While you may not approve of my choice of novels, many of you bring along a favorite book to read in your spare moments. Did you know you can turn your PC Companion into an electronic book viewer?

bREADY lets you view books on your PC Companion

This nifty little application lets you collect and organize data from your desktop PC and then download it to a Handheld or Palm-size PC for easy reference. It sounds excessively productive, but fortunately you can use it to read just about anything you want. bREADY consists of the bREADY Publisher and bREADY Viewer. Publisher installs on your desktop PC and lets you create documents formatted for viewing on H/PCs or Palm-size PCs with the Viewer.

bSQUARE has versions of the Viewer for the Handheld PC, H/PC Pros, and Palm-size PC, and gives them away for free. You can download them from bSQUARE's Web site (www.bsquare.com/develop ment/products/hpc/ready.htm). Once you've installed Viewer on your PC Companion, you can view any bREADY-formatted book document.

The main bREADY Viewer screen shows the organization of the book in the left of the display (Chapters, sub-sections or parts, the index, and bookmarks). Tap on the desired chapter and the text is displayed on the right of the screen (see Screen 1).

You can view the book in a full screen mode (Screen 2) and an auto-scrolling mode (Screen 3). Auto-scrolling displays large text on the full screen, and automatically scrolls down the page. You can set this feature to scroll as fast or as slow as you want, or you can use your H/PC's UpArrow and DownArrow keys to manually move up and down through the text in any of the views. Use the scroll buttons on your Ps/PC.

Using bREADY Viewer is relatively easy. The maximum font size of the text in the main viewer screen looks to be about 12 pts. I think they need to up that to 16 pts. Fortunately, the auto-scroll view displays the text in what looks to be about 24 pt ­ very easy to read.

Screen 1: The main bREADY Viewer screen, shown here on both the Handheld and Palm-size PC screens, displays the organization of the book in the left of the display (Chapters, sub-sections or parts, the index, and bookmarks). Tap on the desired chapter and the text is displayed on the right of the screen. Viewed here is Mark Twain's Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.

Screen 2: bREADY Viewer can display the book text in a full-screen view. You can also adjust the size of text.

Screen 3: bREADY Viewer's auto-scroll feature, displays a large-text, full-screen view of the book and automatically moves down the page as fast or as slow as you desire.

Where to get bREADY books

There are a number of sources for electronic books formatted for the bREADY Viewer. The Viewer comes with The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven by Mark Twain, and a few others. The bREADY Web ring lists four sites where you can download public-domain material formatted for the bREADY viewer. These include:

Geno's eBook Library

www.dahilig.com/PalmPC/bReady.htm

bSQUARE's samples

www.bsquare.com/development/products/bREADYBooks.htm

Electronic bREADY&trade

www.seanet.com/~fulcanelli/books.html

Electronic Text Library

www.nwlink.com/~smakofs/library.htm

Creating your own bREADY books

You can also use bREADY Publisher on your desktop PC to convert text in a format that can be read by the Viewer. That means that you can download any public-domain book in electronic format, (articles, news, reference material, etc.) from the Internet or a company intranet, convert it to Viewer format with table of contents and indexes, and transfer it to your PC Companion for mobile reading.

To test this feature, I downloaded a text file containing the classic hero-myth Beowulf, from the official Project Gutenberg Web site (http://promo.net/ pg/list.html). Project Gutenberg is the largest source of public domain electronic texts available. Its "Etexts" are plain text files that can be viewed in any word processor, on any computer platform available. They can be easily converted to a format useable by the bREADY Viewer by bREADY Publisher.

I opened bREADY Publisher on my desktop PC, went to the File menu and selected "New" to create a new book. Then I went to the Tools menu and selected "Import Text File." The dialog screen that popped up let me browse my desktop PC's directories to find the desired text file. I found the Beowulf text file, clicked on the "Import" button and bREADY Publisher loaded the text file and divided it into chapters. bSQUARE says you can use Publisher to move chapters around and edit the book, but I left it as it was imported. Then, I went back to Tools menu and selected "Publish." I was given the option to save the book to a file, or send it directly to my PC Companion. I chose to send it directly to the Aero 2100 Palm-size PC I had connected to my desktop PC. It worked without a hitch.The bREADY Viewer and a demo version of bREADY Publisher can be downloaded free of charge from the bSQUARE Web site at :

www.bsquare.com/development/products/hpc/ready.htm.

bREADY Publisher is priced at $49.95 for a single-user copy. For more information, contact the bSQUARE Corporation; Phone: 888-820-4500; Web: www.bsquare.com.

Something a little more current than Beowulf

bREADY and Project Gutenberg help you with public domain books, but not current commercial titles. If you want to read (or listen to) Steven King or Steven Covey, you have to look elsewhere. There are two solutions:

The World Bookstore

Librius.com Inc. is starting this service for Windows CE and 3COM Palm users. They will make available free book-reader software (eBook) for the two platforms. You purchase and download the electronic book from their online store (www.librius.com). You can also download the free book-reader software from this site. According to Librius, eBook will let users select screen orientation and font size, read hypertext, display images, have international language support, and more. The software and the site were not ready when we went to press, so I have no feedback on this service, the selection or the cost of the books. For more information, contact Librius.com, Phone: 425-454 7557 (U.S.); E-mail: info@librius.com; Web: www.librius.com.

AudiblePlayer

AudiblePlayer lets you listen to audio versions of popular titles on your Palm-size PC. Programs are selected and purchased online from the 17,000 hours available at www.audible.com, downloaded to a desktop PC, and automatically transferred to the AudiblePlayer on the Palm-size PC. The AudiblePlayer is free and can be downloaded from the company Web site. For more information, contact Audible Inc.; Phone: 1-888-283-5051; E-mail: customer_service@audible.com; Web: www.audible.com.