The only other reader I use is Ramond Zhang’s Mdict 2.5.
which I use because of sh0dan’s equally excellent wiki download

Keep up the good work, David, I’ll be adding your blog to my bookmarks.

I quoteth:

Plucker is an offline Web and e-book viewer for PalmOS® based handheld devices and PDAs. Plucker comes with Unix, Linux Windows and Mac OSX tools, scripts, and conduits that let you decide exactly what part of the World Wide Web you’d like to download onto your PDA (as long as they’re in standard HTML or text format). These web pages are then processed, compressed, and transferred to the PDA for viewing by the Plucker viewer.

Plucker supports many features, including clickable images (pan and zoom), italic, narrow, and HiRes fonts, multiple concurrent databases, configurable display parameters and stylus options (gestures and hardware button navigation) ZLib and DOC compression, Perl and Python conduits and parsers, a Windows fully-integrated installer, and a whole lot more!

Through the use of intelligent desktop ‘parsers’, content can be created for Plucker from many sources, including RSS, RDF, text files, HTML, PDF, and many other file formats.

Plucker is Free Software and that means that you can use it without charge, you can give it away to others, and that you can even modify the program (or pay others to do it for you) to customize it or add the features you want.

/end quote

I use it to read the up-to-date news on my cheapo Palm on the way to work. It’s very easy to use and supports a wide range of Operating systems. It would’ve been nice if there was a PocketPC version for you Windows guys out there, but still, it’s a very useful ebookreader…

A highly polished, OpenReader-compatible version of dotReader, the first implementation of the standard, will be out in the next month or so. We’d love other implementations to follow. Meanwhile Rosetta Solutions, a prominent format translator that does work for major publishers, is very happy with OpenReader technically and plans to use the format for a major international aid organization. It’ll be great if you and your readers can spread the happy news. Thanks! If you’re sick of the proprietary approach prevailing, here’s a chance to change that.

dotReader’s developer, OSoft, is a little two-man company in Washington State without the big guys’ promo budgets. But technically its new reading program will be far ahead, with such features as shared annotations and interbook deep linking (just two examples!). In the near future it will be possible for forums and even blogs to appear within OSoft’s books.

Freeload Press, a textbook publisher, mentioned last week by the Associated Press, ABC News, etc., will be releasing ad-supported dotReader books in the near future. The format can be used without or without ads.

Meanwhile major book publishers and other companies, including one of the world’s most famous high-brow magazines, are taking a good look at the format and reader. The big question is, “Who’s gonna be first?” We have no control over publishing bureaucrats. But I will say that a number of them are tired, tired, tired of the Tower of eBabel–all those clashing e-book formats. We know the game plan of the big boys. They’re going to talk open but act proprietary, through DRM gotchas. Sony is one of the biggest villains, with the BBeB format, which even a blogger with Adobe, a Sony partner, regards as ephemeral. OSoft, by contrast, wants e-book standards for everything.

To see OSoft’s dotReader, check out the preview of the interface; then Actually the main interface shown is just one of a bunch of possibilities. This is an open-source program open to endless changes.

For a Binder Document draft spec of the OpenReader standard, go here, and for an actual book in the format, go here. For more info on the format, contact Jon Noring, the Consortium’s main founder.

I’m, too, am a fan of uBook and have pestered OSoft to pick up various features in dotReader. OSoft will be all ears for people wanting features. Just e-mail the CEO, Mark Carey, and he’ll see if he can oblige.

Thanks,
David Rothman
Co-founder of the OpenReader Consortium
and moderator of TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, telephone 703-370-6540

i for myself have buy a small MS reader Generator by the name of “Reader Works” that permit me to generate every kind of txt files to MS Reader format.

ilan