eBooks on the P800
One of the reasons I took the plunge and upgraded my old Nokia 8250 to the new P800 is that I wanted a portable device to read eBooks on. I had originally gone onto eBay looking for an obsolete £30 Palm and ended up with a £150 P800 phone, but that's another story...
One of my early finds on the P800 was MobiPocket Reader. This is a great eBook reader which can handle many (but not all) popular formats. The one major drawback is that it does not like gzipped text files (oddly enough the default reader that comes with the P800 handles them with aplomb). Since a gzipped text ebook can be 30% the size of a plain text ebook I really wanted an easy way to compress my many plain text ebooks into a format MobiPocket would like.
Enter Pordible. This is a slick OS X drag-and-drop app that converts text or html files into a compressed .pdb (PalmDoc) file. PalmDoc is not quite as space efficient as gzipped text, but it's pretty good. And it is compatible with MobiPocket 
One final note: after bluetoothing a .pdb file over to the phone, I found that it would only get imported into MobiPocket's library if MobiPocket was not loaded. If MobiPocket was already open in the background, it would read the .pdb file, but would leave it in the Beamed messages folder. My workaround is just to remember to quit MobiPocket before bluetoothing a new ebook over.
Related entries
Free eBooks for your P800 - 9 October 2004More Mobipocket Conversions - 19 June 2004
eBooks and DRM - 28 August 2004
iSilo for UIQ goes beta - 9 December 2004
London A-Z on your P800 - 1 August 2005
Backing up the P800 - 29 June 2004
Lens your P800 - 20 August 2004
P800 USB charger - 10 November 2004
P800 Screen Lock - 30 May 2004
Comments
by: SeriousSam at June 8, 2004 3:42 PM
I cannot think why I never noticed this. For many months now I wondered why my books would never appear in the mobipocket library. Now I know! Thanks.
by: Johan Berg at July 11, 2004 6:36 PM
Why do people stay with their problems instead of asking the technical support ?
I had the same problem. I wrote a message (http://www.mobipocket.com/en/Support/default.asp) and I got an answer in less than 12 hours.
This way 7 months ago !
by: Betty at August 25, 2004 2:21 PM
Sponsors
Hey! Sweet tip dude! This 'feature' of mobipocket has been frustrating me forever! Liking your page too, have it bookmarked now
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