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This report also appeared at Internet Tablet Users blog. Full disclosure: I purchased my Nokia 770 at a significant discount via a developer device program; those monies were donated to the Gnome Foundation.
FBReader on Nokia 770 released – best ebook reader ever?
December 2, 2005 | 10:18 am
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By Roger Sperberg, New York Editor for TeleRead
E-book nirvana, if not yet here, is at least one step closer.
Mikhail Sobolev has issued FBReader v0.71 (the program is written by Nikolay Pultsin) for the Nokia 770 in a version any user can install. We now have e-books you can read on an incredible display, carrying it around with you, on a device that also performs general computer functions (since it’s a regular Linux computer, though keyboardless).
Additionally, Linux desktop versions with GTK+ and QT interfaces are also available.
While its native format is FB2 (FictionBook 2), FBReader will also read Plucker e-books, as well as html and text files. It presents the information in paged — rather than scrolling — form, allows the human reader to select fonts and sizes, rotates the text to portrait mode if desired, provides for a variety of language hyphenations, and uses the zoom + and – keys to page through the text. What’s more it pages quickly on the 770, with a sprightly feel.
In offline mode, Mikhail reports up to six hours’ reading on his Nokia 770 on a single battery charge.
Above, you can see a page from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha rotated 90 degrees. When you turn the 770 to read the text, the zoom + key falls naturally under your right forefinger, making paging very natural.
While the program is not yet complete — no bookmarks or highlighting yet — on the Nokia 770′s dazzling 225-pixel-per-inch screen, it already provides the best electronic reading experience you can obtain, bar none.
You can see screenshots of FBReader at
only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/maemo/fonts.html
only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/maemo/screenshots.html
topicalweb.com/making-ebooks/fbreader-captures.htm
This report also appeared at Internet Tablet Users blog. Full disclosure: I purchased my Nokia 770 at a significant discount via a developer device program; those monies were donated to the Gnome Foundation.
Update: What’s really interesting is that today it was reported that an open-source text-to-speech package called Flite (www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/) has been ported to the Nokia 770. That would make this device even more useful as an e-book reader.
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Comments:
Can you get some borders around that text? Seems sorta cramped. I’d like adjustable borders, ala MS Reader width on a PPC. Nice reading, that way.
Sure. The tools include margin controls, which allow you to set each margin independently — by default the left, right and bottom margins are set to 4 pixels. Those pixels are, of course, only 1/225th of an inch wide.
So you can set them to whatever feels most comfortable to you. I think Misha put up a screen capture of this dialog.
And there’s a generous margin applied automatically when you’re in normal mode. (See my screen captures.)
alright! progress! love to see it!
-bowerbird
[...] With the 770’s incredible resolution, the curved and diagonal letter shapes in FBReader are beyond that ever encountered in an e-book reader — it’s easy to say, as I have at MobileRead, at Teleread, at Internet Tablet Users blog, that the FBReader on the 770 is the best e-book reader ever, bar none. Add color pictures to the text (OK, not so many of those public-domain ebooks have color illustrations) and it’s just icing on the cake. [...]
So, how does it compare to reading on the Librie?
Have you tried reading longer texts?
Can the brightness be reduced to make it comfortable to read in total darkness?
Yes, the brightness can be reduced — as you would expect, the 770 has a ten-level brightness control accessible from within any application.
I can’t compare it to the Librie because I’ve never seen one — I’m looking for a smaller device that I can also use for general purpose computing and browsing, and not an e-book-reading-exclusively device. I also prefer color capabilities. But the display controls on the 770 using FBReader — you can pick any font you own, change type size in pixel increments (225 pixels per inch) and ditto margins and leading, and so on — allow you to customize the text appearance to your own individual notion of perfection.