I have always thought freeware is scary. The bogging down of your computer by scanware and virus's like some STD-inflicted bath house seems ever so threatening. Yet as I search the internet at work today I discovered two websites that will be downloaded to my PowerBook when I get home.
Book2Pod is a program to format long text documents for use with the iPod Note Reader. This feature (available with iPod firmware 1.3 or above) allows small text documents to be displayed on the iPod's screen. Normally, the Note Reader has a file size limit of 4KB per note, so it isn't much use for long documents. Book2Pod (Mac version here) gets round this limit by splitting files up into multiple notes. It is also designed to let you better organise large documents. Book2Pod tries to split documents at natural breaks in the text (for a book, this would be every chapter). The string used to split the file is specified by the "Break on:" field. A book might use the string "^CHAPTER " if all the chapters started like "CHAPTER THREE - THE INVITATION". See the note below for why the "^" character has special meaning. Obviously if a chapter is over 4 kilobytes in length it will be further subdivided. You can set up as many split-up documents (or 'books' as they're called in the app) as you like.
Once you download the freeware program, you will need literature which is then when I went looking for free ebooks, in a TXT document so that I could use book2pod. Gutenberg.org is just that. If you read Tom Clancy or John Grisham then you might be shit out of luck but if you want the classics, then this site is for you. And it even allows you to read some of the thousands of titles in a few languages.
Both programs have excellent reviews. Search for yourself. :)
I've never gotten into reading stuff on my iPod yet. Hell, I haven't even used the Contacts feature yet. I suppose, there are other uses of the iPod instead of listening to Podcasts and music, right?
Posted by: Groove | August 08, 2005 at 09:15 PM