Another way to read ebooks

I recently asked the question “How do you read ebooks?” and explained that I had unexpectedly found a way to do this on my Blackberry mobile phone. I also went on to remark “Now that I have perfected the art of reading ebooks on my Blackberry, an even better solution has come along”, though I did not say then what this was. I wanted to try out this new “solution” properly before talking about it.

Just when we might have thought that, what with desktop PCs, laptops, notebooks and “smartphones”, there wasn’t any space left into which you could squeeze yet another device, along came the “tablet PC”, something that resembles the school pupil’s slate of yore but with a functionality approaching that of a small PC.

Tigger is always on the lookout for new things and bought, not one, but two of these “tablets”. One malfunctioned almost immediately and after a couple of days gave up the ghost, refusing even to switch on. I won’t say what model it was because it’s always possible to get one bad machine among a bunch that perform perfectly. The retailer made no bones about refunding the money.

The second machine was an Archos 7 Home Tablet which Carphone Warehouse just happened to be selling at a good price of around £75. Like most of its kind, this has the Android operating system and comes with a number of applications ready installed, such as a Web browser and an email client.

Tigger took to it like the proverbial duck to water but I must admit that I was somewhat bemused by this device. In fact, I couldn’t really see the point of it, at least as far as my own usage patterns were concerned. At home I used a PC and “on the road” I used my Blackberry: what else could I need? Well, I was about to find out!

Not heeding my studied lack of interest, Tigger offered to buy me an Archos as a present. I said no thanks, I don’t see the point of having one. But then the light-bulb moment happened: Tigger, I saw, was reading H.G. Well’s The Invisible Man, and reading it as an ebook on her Archos. The 7-inch screen was a lot more comfortable to read than the tiny screen of my Blackberry and could be adjusted for colour and font size. I gave in and accepted the gift. Now, some weeks later, I have a better idea of what the Archos can offer the user, especially a user interested in reading ebooks.

I think it important to point out that the Archos is the only Android machine I have ever used and that my remarks pertain directly to this device. I cannot say how good or bad Android is in general and how far the faults I find in the Archos are faults of the Android operating system or of the device itself. This should be borne in mind in reading the rest of this post.

With regard to general use as a device that can go online, I would say that the Archos is roughly equivalent to a smartphone except for the size of the display. To write, you have to use the on-screen keyboard, which is somewhat clunky, while the keyboard layout seems to be different on different occasions, depending on what  you are doing, so that a symbol such as ‘@’ will be visible on the alphabetic screen for one application but will have to be sought on the numeric screen for another application. There seems to have been a failure to achieve joined-up thinking at the design stage.

I think the Android operating system (though remember my caveat above) shows the weakness of its origins as an operating system for mobile phones. For a tablet that aspires to be a PC, it is short on functionality and clunky to use. The browser and the email client are usable but it’s a relief to get back to a “proper” computer. More expensive models are no doubt faster and provide more functionality so I am not going to condemn either Android or the Archos out of hand until I have gained more experience of what is on offer.

This brings us to the above mentioned ebook-reading capability. This is provided on the Archos by a preloaded application called Aldiko. It is quite a basic facility and its use is not all that obvious. You need to poke around in the settings and try things in order to learn how to use it. The first thing to do, once you have charged up your Archos and learned the basic functions, is to update the installed version of Aldiko. This is easy to do because there is something called AppsLib installed which gives you access to the Android market of applications, both free and paid-for. The updated version provides a few more functions and a couple or so more free books. The update is well worth doing and is free.

The Archos is gravity-sensitive so you can turn the screen any way and it will rotate the display as appropriate. This means that you can read books in either portrait or landscape configuration.

Unless you are content with the free titles supplied, you need to learn how to obtain more books. It took me a while to figure this out. First, I should tell you that the Archos has a system memory of 8 gb and this can be added to with an 8 gb micro HCSD card. (Get one with an adaptor so you had also plug it into other devices for the purpose of swapping files.)

So the first way to give Aldiko ebooks to work with is to download them on your PC, transfer them to the memory card and move the memory card to the Archos. (It doesn’t matter that you are mixing Windows and Android systems, as they can both read cards manipulated by one another without any difficulty.)

You now run Aldiko and click on the icon of a little house at top left on the bookshelf screen. This produces a screen with several brown icons, one of which is labelled SD card. Click on this and make your way along the chain of folders until you come to the ebook file. Click on it and a little window opens offering two functions, Open and Import to Aldiko. If you choose the latter, the book is added to your bookshelf and is ready for reading. You can then delete the file from the card as it is no longer needed.

The other way to acquire ebooks is by going online with your Archos to a site that supplies them, such as Project Gutenberg, and downloading the book you require. (In the case of Gutenberg, it’s best to contact the mobile site m.gutenberg.com, as the full site is a bit too meaty for the Archos – or is it Android? – to handle.) The downloaded ebook will be in a folder in system memory called, reasonably enough, Downloads. You import the book into Aldiko as described above. Yes, you still have to click on SD card, even though the book is in system memory.

As far as I can see, Aldiko recognizes only two ebook formats, epub and PDF. If you are lucky, the ebook comes complete with a front cover which looks nice on the bookshelf but, more importantly, tells you what the book is. For some reason, books obtained from Gutenberg do not display the title and this is a nuisance if you have several of them as you are likely to open the wrong one.

Provided that you close Aldiko down properly, it will remember where you got to and open the book at the right page next time. You can also set bookmarks though, to be honest, I have never mastered this function.

So how does the Archos compare as an ereader? As I have never used a “proper” ereader, it is obviously impossible for me to say. I find the Archos perfectly adequate for the purpose. To turn the page, I just tap the right-hand side of the screen with my finger nail, or the left-hand side to go back a page.

There are two weaknesses to the Archos as a book reader. First, and less serious, it becomes fairly hot in use. You may prefer to place it on a cushion rather than directly on your bare knee, though it is not hot enough to burn, just enough to be uncomfortable. The more serious weakness is the poor battery life. While you are reading, the battery runs down very quickly. This would definitely be a problem if you wanted to use it to read during a long train journey, say. In that case, you would have to hope to have a seat with a power point as is increasingly the case these days. To read in bed, I have rigged up a trailing socket so that I can keep the Archos plugged in and charged.

I think you can buy a mobile charger for the Archos, one that runs off batteries such as those that you can buy to charge mobile phones. If so, that would be a solution to the battery-life problem, especially if you used rechargeable batteries for the task.

While I can read epub books quite comfortably on my mobile, PDF files are more of a problem. That is because PDF files are strictly formatted and will therefore not reflow to suit the borders of the display. I am reading L’Immoraliste by André Gide and it is practically unreadable on my phone because when it fits the screen, the print is too tiny to read, and if I zoom in, it spreads beyond the edges of the screen so that I have to scroll right and left to read. This problem does not arise when reading PDF files on the Archos because the screen is big enough to accommodate print of a legible size.

Does this experience make me more likely to acquire a dedicated ereader? At present I am undecided. Despite its clunkiness, the Archos does have the basic functions of a computer and this means that it performs at least two functions – those of portable computer and ereader – and therefore helps avoid a proliferation of devices. Also, I am far from convinced that, for me at least, the day of the paper book has passed. I like paper books and have no plans to abandon them yet.

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