eReader’s program provides a simple way to create multi-platform e-books on Windows and Mac desktops, but its feature set is too limited for a commercial application.
(este artículo también está disponible en español)
Among the many available e-book formats, one of the most popular is eReader, previously known as Palm Reader. Its documents are relatively compact, they can be password-protected, it has DRM (Digital Rights Management, i.e. copy-protection) and there are native viewers for the Windows, Macintosh, Palm OS, Pocket PC and Symbian operating systems, so the same document can be read on multiple platforms.
There are several ways to convert an existing digital document into an eReader e-book. In this story we covered some of them. However, there’s another one, allegedly the easiest and most straightforward: using the eBook Studio software program, sold by eReader in versions for Windows and for Mac OS X. Both of them are identical in their look and functionality. We have tested the Macintosh version. It is a commercial application that sells for US$ 30. Demo versions are also available, but they insert a clearly visible ‘demo’ watermark on all pages of the finished e-book.
eBook Studio displays a single window, intended to mimic the look of the document on the screen of a Palm OS handheld. A top row of buttons allows to apply the basic styles (bold, italic, underline, strikeout, superindex, subindex) to the selected text, as well as alignment (left, center, right, indent). You can also insert page breaks, internal hyperlinks, tab stops and horizontal rules, besides marking text segments as headers, up to five levels deep, that the program will use for generating the document table of contents.
Pictures can also be inserted, either from an existing file or pasting them from the clipboard. eBook Studio will save the pictures in PNG format. Anyway, they must be smaller than 148×158 píxels or 64 kB. Otherwise, the viewer will display an icon and the user will have to tap on it to display the full picture.
You can also insert a book plate, that is, the code that displays the owner’s name on encrypted e-books, purchased via the DRM system of online bookstores such as eReader.com.
Finally, you can edit the five information fields (title, author, publisher, copyright and ISBN), that appear when opening the e-book in the eReader viewer.
The text can be typed directly on the editing window, it can be copied and pasted from other applications, or it can be imported from existing text, RTF or HTML documents. In these cases, most of the text styles and internal links, if any, are preserved.
Weak points
eBook Studio uses internally the PML (Palm Markup Language) format. Actually, what the program does is turning into PML tags the attributes we apply to the text. Once the document is completed, the ‘Convert to e-book’ function generates the table of contents and creates the PBD-format file that we can distribute for reading. However, should you ever need to edit it again, you must keep the PML file, because eBook Studio is unable to open directly the PDB files it creates.
Moreover, a function is conspicuous by its absence: the creation of footnotes. Yes, eBook Studio is unable to leverage one of the most powerful features of e-book reading, which is the viewing of embedded notes. Therefore, eBook Studio can be enough for editing novels and other linear-reading works, but it’s clearly insufficient for creating technical or business e-books, or any other kind that resorts to page-footer references.
Finally, it’s also surprising that the preview function of eBook Studio is only able to display how the e-book will look on a low-resolution Palm OS screen (160×160 pixels). If you want to know how the page breaks and layout will look on other devices (320×320 Palm, Pocket PC), you’ll have to assume it or generate the PDB file and actually view it on the target device.
Conclusion and alternatives
eBook Studio provides a basic feature set that would be appropriate for a freeware application, but is clearly not enough in a commercial program. Those users wanting to edit e-books will do well by exploring alternate solutions, such as direct PML tagging (either manually with a text editor, or using some Microsoft Word macro, such as word2pml.dot) and the free Dropbook converter (available for Windows and for Macintosh) also from eReader, that generates the PDB e-book from the tagged text. Unfortunately, this is the only option for anyone requiring advanced features such as footnotes, in their e-books.
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