More on the Sync and eBooks

So I've been fooling around more with the Samsung Sync and eBook reading and I've discovered a few new bits that might be helpful to anyone who would like to use the device for reading eBooks. I'm preparing for a presentation on eBooks that I'll be giving on Wednesday, so I'm doing some experimentation with various hardware and software tools.

I downloaded Rudy Rucker's latest book Postsingular which Rudy is making available for free download as an eBook on his site. Thanks, Rudy! I'm going to be using it as an example of HTML and PDF formatted eBooks in my demos on Wednesday. As I pointed out in my previous post on the Sync, PDF is really not a viable format for that device. So I'll be referring to the HTML version of the text here.

The first issue I ran into was an error saying that the page was too big and that it might not display properly. Indeed, it did not. In fact, it wouldn't display anything but the first screen of text. So I decided to try splitting the page into smaller bits. Luckily, Postsingular made this easy since there are four roughly equal parts in the novel and the HTML version had a linked Table of Contents to the various part headings and chapters. So I fired up a nice text editor (I like Notepad++) and used cut and paste to create four separate files. I went to the first section and edited the HTML links to point to these new pages and left the targets for the anchor tags as they were after adding the new page references. This was an easy enough task for me, but the average person might not have been able to do even this basic HTML editing. So this issue is a real barrier for the average person using this device for eBook reading.

After I split up the parts into separate pages, I moved them into a folder together and copied them to the MicroSD card on the phone. I would be testing two things here. First, that splitting the eBook into four files ranging from 115 to 178 KB would solve the "Page too big" error. And second, if that worked, I would be testing whether I could link among pages on the local file system (in this case, the folder I created on the MicroSD card) and also whether I could link to anchors embedded in the page from the Table of Contents on the first page of the eBook. When I opened the first page, all seemed well. The page loaded fine and I was able to navigate a screen at a time by paging down with the phone. When I came to the Table of Contents, the links looked intact and I was able to select them by moving the cursor down until each was highlighted in turn. I clicked the link for a chapter in the second document and after a (longer than expected) pause the page loaded fine and I was at the anchor embedded halfway through the document. Voila!

Here are the two most important lessons learned from this exercise. First, if you want to read long eBooks on the phone, you're going to want to divide the text into several HTML files. And second, you're going to want to create links between and among those files, either through a Table of Contents or some other organizational structure. For instance, for a long text with many files, I would want to create a start page that contained nothing but a detailed Table of Contents with links to smaller sections of the text. That way, if I am reading and have to stop and shut down the browser, I won't have to page down a hundred times to get to my place later. That'd be really annoying.

Bottom line: you need to have some technical expertise in working with HTML to really use the phone for eBooks. For many people, this is too tall an order. Many of these same considerations apply to other devices that I've experimented with, such as the PSP. Similar issues would apply to the iPhone or the iPod Touch, for that matter.