Thursday, December 09, 2010

Epub Reader for Symbian Series 60 5th edition!

Yes, I've finally found an ebook reader for my Nokia 5800 that is capable of handling the epub format! When I first got my phone I searched all over the web and settled on zxreader. A basic but function reader capable of handling plain text and the, in the western world, somewhat obscure FictionBook fb2 format.

Now, with the freeware tool Calibre converting to this format was no big issue but occasionally I would end up with weird formatting and the rather basic nature of the format was at times rather annoying. Additionally quite a lot of ebooks are now released in the epub format

Figuring that eventually someone would write the application I needed I kept looking for a solution every other month. I even tried Nokia's own OVI store but that proved to be as useless as ever.

Yesterday I found the Dorian Reader project. Initially started as a project for the N900 but recently also available for Symbian. My first test proved rather futile, it is written in QT, a JAVA-like "write once, run anywhere" environment which requires a seperate framework to be installed on your phone something which the author kindly pointed out to me.

So, what do you need:
QT 4.7.1
Latest version of Dorian for Symbian (0.4.2. at time of writing)
Some epub books

And you're good to go!

The application takes just a bit longer to load than zxreader but is a lot more intuitive to use, especially when you go into the options screen. It seems very stable, only imperfections I've seen so far is that having to tap the upper right corner to turn a page seems a bit counter intuitive and sometimes when you turn a page the first line is only half visible.
Main bug I've found so far is that when the phone switches from landscape to portrait or back it's inclined to switch back to the beginning of the chapter but that may be something just on my phone.

EDIT:

I've dumped the Nokia early this year and went to an HTC Desire. The Android platform is so incredibly much more mature for the mobile reader. I'm running cool reader on mine. Uses almost no resources, is free, reads all the major formats including epub . With Android you go to the market (build in on just about all phones) and download any of the half a dozen excellent and well maintained ebook readers for free!!

4 comments:

PoD ClaN said...

Thanks, it helped a lot , except that i had to manually sign it for my Vivaz pro.

Cellular-Decay said...

You should try AlbiteReader. It's a Java app (.jar) and is waaay better than Dorian. I use it on my N8, and it rocks!

http://albite.vlexofree.com/

ezaat said...

Did you try:

Albite reader?
http://albite.vlexofree.com/reader

It works really well on my Nokia 6710 Navigator Symbian S60^3 phone

Anonymous said...

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