Review: Mobipocket Reader and Creator
Posted on May 26, 2007 by LJ Earnest
Categories: Review,Software
Originally published on 23 March 2006
Summary
Mobipocket Reader, by Mobipocket, is a PDA document reader. This, along with Mobipocket’s Mobipocket Creator, allow me to read books and offline websites on my PDA.
Overview
Manufacturer: Mobipocket
Platform: Palm
Current Version: Palm: 5.1; Windows: 4.0
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Allows me to create take-along reading from websites
- Allows me to link to other people’s published content created through the Creator
- The Creator is very easy to use to hook up to websites
- Large amounts of books available in the format, both from the manufacturer and other sites,like Blackmask
- Could access a (purchased separately) dictionary from within the books
- External card support
- Reader is free
Cons
- Very large (almost 900K for the previous version of the reader)
- The Hotsync tool needed to get content from the PC to the PDA is slow, and regenerates the website subscriptions either every time you sync, or leaves it manual
- Couldn’t access the dictionary from other applications or without going into Mobipocket Reader
- The content fetching tool had items that didn’t work (emailing content to myself and timed fetches)
- The creator tried to make it easy to fetch content from sites, but often couldn’t handle basic sites
Why Did I Download/Buy This?
I originally bought this program because it was easy to get free reading material for it, and at the time, it was one of the best out there. I am long an electronic reader – I had originally started out with the Rocket EBook, but the company that made this single-purpose device sold out to RCA, who then dismantled the business. So I was in the market for a good reader. I looked at other reader programs, but I found the most content available for Mobipocket on the sites that I used for already published material. I then bought a dictionary, because I like to have one available to me at all times. A few months later, I saw that I could use the Creator to mine websites for the reader – particularly my hometown newspaper and my mother’s hometown newspaper.
Why Did I Stop Using This?
Mobipocket was never easy to update; I basically had two options – remember to manually update it and then sync, or have it fetch new content every time I synced. Even with a high-speed connection at home, the sync time was still massive if I had a few newspapers in there. But I dealt with this for about a year. When I saw that Mobipocket had come out with an upgrade, I wondered if they had fixed the problem. But the program size had grown so much that I wasn’t willing to give up the real estate. Over 1MB is too much room on my main memory for something like this.
What have I replaced this with?
When I was looking at my favorite source site, I noticed they had started providing content in Plucker format. And after checking out Plucker, I was hooked. I will give a review of this product in a future article.
How Did I Use This?
I never have time to read newspapers, and using Mobipocket was one way to keep up on my news. I don’t trust TV and radio news, and prefer to get a mixture of US and foreign newspapers for a broader perspective. This program allowed me to always have reading material with me.
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