Nokia E71 Application Week - Day 4: Mobireader
Ever since it got released sometime in 2006, Mobireader has been the first application I install on any of my S60 3rd Edition phones. It’s also the one application that has survived 2 years of S60 3rd hurricanes of applications and managed to remain consistently on my top priority list. Why? Because Mobireader was the reason I fell in love with S60 in the first place. On the E71, this application looks even more awesome and much better laid out in landscape and fullscreen mode. With the qwerty keypad readily available, adding notes, making searches and everything else is even faster than on T9 handsets.
So what is Mobireader? It’s an ebook reading application developped by Mobipocket. It reads ebooks in .prc and .txt format. Mobipocket is a HUGE ebook store that offers some free ebooks, and a lot of commercial ones, but the best thing is that they offer their reader applications for free. So let’s say you purchase an ebook, you can read it on your computer, your S60 phone, your Palm, your Windows Mobile, your Blackberry, with a maximum of 4 devices at the same time… which means that you don’t have to purchase the ebook again if you change your phone for example. It’s DRM in a nice flavor I think.
Personally, I use Mobireader for two different purposes.
- The first one is entertainment and reading. Since I do most of my usual reading in french, I found this site that offers free legal french ebooks. I’m pretty sure that if you look around, you’ll find other sites that offer free and legal English ebooks in the .prc format that Mobireader uses.
- The second one is that Mobipocket offer medical ebooks, making my pharmacist life a LOT easier compared to running around with 10kg-weighing-books. Most of the ebooks I purchased use an index layout which means that I can search for medical term definition or drug molecules like I would search a database. Wicked!
The best thing about Mobireader is that some ebooks use a table of contents layout that allow you to access a certain chapter or part easily. Mobireader also remembers where you closed the ebook, so the next time you open it, you will be taken to the last page you were reading. You can also add Bookmarks to ebooks as you move along, as well as Annotations, Highlights. You can copy text from the ebook, or modify it. You can also link a certain word to another, in another ebook or in the same one.
The best option though is the look-up one. If you have bought (or illegally got) a dictionary ebook for Mobireader, this dictionary can be used as a base for lookups. This means that by selecting a word in any ebook in your collection, and pressing it, it takes you to the meaning of the word in your dictionary base. Dead useful stuff, and a high priority for me as I use it to look up drugs when I’m surfing my pathology ebooks, and pathologies when surfing my drug ebooks.
Check out some screenshots that show you how Mobireader looks on the E71:
You can also view my video to the Show Your S60 Smarts competition where I show a few functions of Mobireader and how I integrate it into my medical profession lifestyle.
Bonus Link: for anyone in the medical field, you might want to check this thread on Mobipocket’s forum where I posted a handful of links to legally free medical .prc ebooks.
If you used to use avantgo for this mobipocket has definitely stepped up too fill the roll since avantgo stopped supporting S60