Palm: MobiPocket

It's those little discoveries that make my life moderately interesting:
www.mobipocket.com

This is a variation of the eBook. I haven't figured out the nuances of this particular software yet but so far so good. I actually found it because I discovered that Baen is supposedly the leading eBook publisher. Works out just fine for me since they happen to also be a leading publisher of science fiction (which oddly enough I haven't read much of in the last 5 or 6 years anyway).

As it turns out, once a book is older than a couple of years, Baen publishes the same book in a royalty-free elecrtronic format for you to download from their web-site. In fact, the latest Honor Harrington hardback by David Weber came with a CD-ROM featuring a full library of the series to date. Naturally - you know me - I downloaded the disc without buying the book (yes, before you even need to ask - the disc is free to distribute and share; I'm not doing anything illegal... just somewhat ambiguously immoral).

Anywho - so I find out that the disc contained a choice of formats to read in. It's set up like a web-site you look at with a browser but then you can load in each novel in HTML, a Rich Text File, or an eBook format for MobiPocket...

...And there's a free "read-only" version of Mobi-Pocket available for download (not unlike Adobe Acrobat, that is). Anyway, I'm just highly amused that after months of not reading anything with my handheld, I've revitalized its purpose.

On a side note - if you've got an older Palm device like I do, I suggest trying the "archives" at MobiPocket - they have older versions which might work better (for the record, my PalmOS would crash when I tried to run the latest version).