Phone/PDA Perfect Place for E-books: Catch Up on Reading During Downtime

How many times have you found yourself sitting in traffic, waiting for a bus or a plane or languishing in the car while your wife or significant other does the shopping? There's only so much radio to which you can listen.

Believe it or not, I spend a lot of time with my Audiovox PPC 6700 Windows Mobile based smart phone reading books and magazines during these "down times". There are thousands of titles available that can be downloaded to your handheld computer. Readers of all genres will find something to whet their reading appetites. I especially like the escapism of the man Star Trek titles, as well as best-sellers through venues such as Amazon.

Most downloadable books come in several formats because Palm uses one way to encode text and Microsoft another. It's even possible to purchase e-books in the PDF format, but I do not recommend it because of memory usage issues, and that can be bad news for some smaller handhelds that do not have much room for data storage.

Many of today's newer machines have memory card slots that can be used to give these devices hundreds of megabytes of memory. This extra space can partially be used to store literally hundreds of e-books if you wish. I use a gigabyte card in my 6700 and even with the 150 books I store there, lots of room remains for MP3 music files if I tire of reading. Or, they could be audio books if I want.

One way I use my device is to copy text I want to read later from Internet sites and save them in text or Microsoft Word formats and store the files on my handheld. Some programs are available that will allow modifying or editing text if you need to do that sort of work away from your desk.

I'm sure many of you are saying to yourself that the letters must be very small to get pages of copy onto a handheld such as a Palm or CE device. Actually, the size and font can be adjusted with many of the reader programs. But, even using "normal" size (default) type the words are quite easy to read. Admittedly, there are a lot more pages to "turn," but after the first few minutes most readers won't notice that.

Most programs allow you to insert bookmarks and return to specific pages/passages ... and it's easy to turn the page with the four-way thumb switch most PDAs have. No more licking a finger to grip a stubborn page so it will turn (grin).

How do you find e-books? The easy way is to just go to Google and do a simple check on the word. I think you'll be very surprised and pleased at the number of writers and subjects available. My suggestion is to find either one of your favorites or a smaller, easy read to become familiar with the format(s) available.

Next time you have some time on your hands just whip out your phone or PDA and begin reading. It will make the time go by much faster.