Laptop screens are often set up for the landscape mode—they’re wider than tall. This might be good for watching videos but not for reading e-books.
Some software such as yBook or Mobipocket can actually let you take advantage of landscape and display two "pages" on the screen at once. But what if you simply want to see one page and have the screen go up and down, in the portrait mode?
The EeeRotate solution
One solution might be a program called EeeRotate, discussed in an article from ActuaLitté. It runs under Windows XP. EeeRotate is designed for the ASUS Eee machines. bu tyou can run it on others, including the Lenovo IdeaPad S10. A download link and a few more details are here. Many thanks to Nicolas Gary at ActuaLitté.
Original French-language information: EeeRotate write-up and Lenovo-related article.
Other possible rotation solutions
But how about other solutions? Doesn’t Ficbot use an Eee-class machine? I’d welcome her thoughts and others’ on the rotation issue. Are there other solutions for people wanting to use the portrait mode? And on at least some Eee machines, is some equivalent software already bundled in? Whatever the case, EeeRotate could be useful for other notebooks without the rotation capability.
FBReader, in particular
If you don’t need to read DRMed files and want to read E in the portrait mode, then one solution in particular might be FBReader.
This free open source program runs under XP and Linux and can display ePub, ASCII, HTML and many other formats in both portrait and landscape modes on a variety of machines, including Eee PCs. More information here.
linux users can use xrandr in a terminal. like:
xrandr -o right
to rotate screen.
They really need to make a tablet version like the XO.
Heck, now all we really need is a netbook with a 180-degree hinge, so the sreen can flip all the way around, making a flat device with keyboard on one side and screen on the other.
Ctrl-Alt-Arrow Key
Just in case anyone comes along wondering – this works fine on the HP Mini 1120 with Windows 7
Ctrl-Alt-Arrow Key does nothing, on either my Dell Latitude D531 or my Dell Mini 10v. I’ve tried several solutions that say they will make the screen rotate, but they don’t. These are both Windows XP machines. I do want to use the Mini10v as an EBook Reading platform, for my library of various accumulated ebook formats.
FBReader also has an option to rotate text into portrait mode, no external software required. I’ve tried it on a full-sized laptop before. A little awkward to read.
Adobe Reader already lets you rotate your PDF ebook 90 degrees! To read PDF files like your photo above, all I do in Adobe Reader is:
View -> Rotate View -> Clockwise (or Counterclockwise)
View -> Page Display -> Single Page
View -> Full Screen Mode (or CTRL-L)
Then I can flip through the book pages with my cursor keys!
Thank you! I just tried EeeRotate on my Windows XP netbook computer. Works like a charm! I had been converting PDFs to Mobipocket format, but I realize that just rotating the PDF document 90 degrees in Adobe Reader or now—in EeeRotate—may be even better! It truly looks like I’m reading a normal book when I lie in bed with my netbook sideways on my chest!
It’s another reason NOT to buy a dedicated ereader.
EeeRotate kinda sucks because it is limited. It does not rotate mouse controls. A better program is iRotate (I actually found it on the same download page as EeeRotate a bit farther down the page). It has more flexibility: 1. you can pick more rotate options which could be important if your netbook/laptop vents hot air to one side or the other… you can have the hot air vent out the top-facing side. 2. It automatically reorients the mouse controls which makes it much more useful for working in other applications in portrait mode (full size page mode in Word is great on my laptop).