I guess extension checking was the easiest way to determine a file type but it is not the correct way. None the less I find such software very useful as it allows me to catch on my reading. Being away all the time I never get the time to read my books. Luckily I have them in digital format and I carry my iPhone around everywhere I go.

Still, PorDBile is the way to convert RTF for iSilo, too.

Use PorDBile. You can drag and drop scores of RTF files to its icon (mine were from Wordsmith on my vintage Palm/Clie). As it converts each of them, it will prompt you for the name (just click return as it guesses you want the name to be the same as the RTF’s name was). The resulting .pdb files can be dragged and dropped on the Stanza Desktop application. It will often fill in the author’s name for you automatically (rather than the Unknown that usually is there).

You can then open up the Stanza app on your IPT/IP, and under shared books, download each one.

While one wishes for a way to categorize them simply on the desktop–and that no conversion would be necessary– this does result in readable files. The paragraphs even have a couple of character indents, which they did not have on the Palm in Wordsmith’s RTF docs!

Still I wish there were an easy way of automatically inserting blank lines between paragraphs, but I’m not about to open each doc and search and replace all paragraph breaks and add an extra one. (Actually that sounds like an excellent job for AppleScript… hmm, maybe I’ll do that!)

In contrast, iSilo actually does read Word .doc and .docx with all formatting intact.

If one looks at the iSilo manual and web pages, RTF is NOT one of their supported formats. Just wanted to re-emphasize that in case any new reader stumbles on this and thinks iSilo is a universal reader (it’s close, but RTF and epub are beyond its ken).

I tried converting RTF to epub, which just produces garbage and gibberish, but one can take an RTF doc and convert it to PDB (e.g., with PorDible), which strips out the RTF commands, but the text still lacks paragraph formatting. To make this work, one needs to open the RTF docs and insert blank lines between paragraphs for readability– a nuisance if you have scores of RTF docs.

As for your other questions about how it compares to loading via iSiloX—well, here’s what you’re going to want to do with iSiloX. Activate the iSilo/iPhone WebDAV server, so iSilo pretends to be a network wireless hard drive. Then set iSiloX’s output folder to the e-book directory in the iSilo drive space, and compile them. (I loaded books onto my Clie’s memory stick that way, too—using the memory stick gateway program to mount it as a USB drive and setting the destination folder to that drive.)

It’d be great if it could read RTF as I have several hundred Wordsmith docs from my Palm days that I’d like to transfer over.

And, yes, Intapaper is great. I specially like the ’tilt’ feature. It would be very welcome to any other of the readers.

You missed several iPhone ebook readers, however (not that I blame you, though, I found these totally by accident, since searching for book or ebook or e-book on the App Store finds all those danged AppEngine books and other stuff gets lost in the flood).

The readers:

- Classic(s)

- ShortBook (or ShortBookLE)
- BookZ

There are other book-in-an-app vendors now too besides AppEngine, and there’s a nice Shakespeare app with all his works. I’d like to see that for other authors with works in the public domain such as all the Sherlock Holmes books etc. There’s a security ebook and ebooks of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution too.

And don’t forget the web-browser-based readers specifically for the iPhone such as those at ManyBooks, TextOnPhone, Scrollbox and Readdle. I think there may be an iPhone APP for Readdle now too, but I am not sure and can’t check at the moment. I probalby won’t use them much anymore, but in the interest of completeness they at least bear a brief mention…

Anyway, keep up the good work and keep working on this article. I’m looking forward to 3.0!

And YES Stanza Desktop REALLY needs to add support for italics and bold at the very least. I’d also love to see it let us edit metadata for a file before saving it as ePub.