The OLPC XO as an e-book reader: Wowio designer shares my enthusiasm and says it can do justice to PDFs

My 5,500-word review of the OLPC’s XO, as an e-book reader, gave it a thumbs-up—with a major caveat: the hardware rocks but the existing software sucks for reading e-books. I found it to be be excruciatingly slow on PDFs viewed with an Evince-based program. What’s more, I could not even load up ad-supported Wowio book such as The Nazis and the Occult. This is one reason why I’m excited to see the faster FBReader running on the XO even though it has flaws such as inability to work with CSS while you’re reading the IDPF‘s .epub format.

Well, who should agree with my general assessment of the XO hardware, for e-books, than Gerry Manacsa, a Wowio designer who writes the excellent Reader blog and shares my appreciation of the XO’s new screen technology.

Only, Gerry goes a step further, saying that that he successfully tried it with a PDF of a Wowio book: “Launch of the various task-oriented apps generally took a bit of patience, with load times taking many long seconds. Once loaded though, performance of apps including the PDF reader were quite acceptable. Scrolling and screen update performance were reasonably peppy, even for a large 310-page document with many embedded photos (like Letters from St. Petersburg, pictured above).” Yes, the photo is Gerry’s. He was so impressed with the XO’s reader for PDF that he said it “actually seems to be more compatible with some PDFs than that in the Sony Reader and the iPhone.”

Why the difference?

So what’s the deal here? Is Gerry’s XO using a different program or a newer version of the Evince-based software to read e-books?  I’d love to be able to enjoy PDFed Wowio books without fuss on my XO. When I have a moment, I’ll try Letters and see if I can replicate Gerry’s results with that book, at least. I’ll welcome hearing from others who’ve tried Wowio books on their machines. Any tips? One thing I might want to do is use the XO with a freshly downloaded file–since that seems to help open Wowio books for conversion through Mobipocket desktop. For some reason, old downloads don’t seem to work with Mobi desktop. But back to the PDF issue and especially the Wowio books. Any ideas?

Details: Yep, I keep hoping that Wowio will go worldwide rather than just limit itself for to the States. Territory-related copyright deals presumably are among the reasons why Wowio is U.S. only. Meanwhile I hope that Wowio will eventually go for the .epub format: files are more compact and display better on PDAs, for example, thanks to .epub’s reflowability.

Housekeeping: I’ll have a long commentary on “Libel, blogs and interactive books: Should you sue a malicious liar if he won’t back off, despite the clear-cut facts”? I know. Most people just want to read about e-book gizmos, thank you. So I’ll arrange for the legal stuff to appear below the present post.