There is no point having a good ebook and then not having the right software(and the hardware ofcourse
)to enjoy the book.
I am compiling a list of the readers, convertors and hardware devices out there you can use to really enjoy your ebooks.
E-Book Readers
Free
Thankfully we have lot of companies offering free readers and not to forget the open source alternatives
1)
yBook
Features:
Runs on any Windows PC (Win95 or later)
Display your book on side-by-side or single pages.
Resize the pages, adjust the margins, set text and paper colour.
Text, html and RTF reader
PDB and PRC reader
Search for words or phrases
Automatic bookmarks
Text sizes from tiny to HUGE
No zooming, panning or scrolling
Direct download of all Gutenberg titles, with index.
Internationalised menus - Spanish, German, etc
Completely free to use: No registration, no adware, no spyware
yBook - a freeware ebook reader
2)
Cool Reader
Opens books from .txt, .doc, .html, .fb2 or .rtf formats with automatic codepage (cp866,cp1251,KOI-8r,latin-1,unicode,utf-8) and format recognition (headers, paragraphs, etc...)
Supports RAR, ZIP, HA, ARJ, LHA archieves
Shows text as continuous Scroll or as Book.
Fully customizable colors, background images, text blending modes, and other ergonomic parameters.
Font antialiasing using a few different methods.
Fullscreen or windowed view mode.
TTS (Read Aloud) using SpeechAPI 4.0 и 5.1 (new!)
Pronounsation dictionaries (new!)
Dictionary editor (new!)
Table of Contents
Bookmarks
Text search
Mouse selection and Copy function
Export of formatted text to HTML or RTF
Stores history of opened books, their last positions and bookmarks.
Extra-smooth, customizable scrolling.
Multilingual interface
CoolReader v2.0 homepage
3)
eReader for Windows(Lite version)
eReader is an award-winning application used to read, manage and organize your eReader.com eBooks on your Windows computer and/or laptop. Our eReader software allows you to read and now manage your ebooks on all of your Windows computers, add bookmarks, navigate your eBooks easily, and search for words in your book.
eReader for Windows Software - eReader.com
4)
Microsoft ebook reader (lit format support)
Patented ClearType display technology revolutionizes on-screen reading.
Add electronic bookmarks and use them in powerful ways.
Move easily with your keyboard, mouse, or stylus.
Catalogue all your eBooks in your personalized "home page."
Search for text in any eBook.
Add your own notes to any page.
Create large-print eBooks with a single command.
Create free-form drawings on your eBook pages.
Take full advantage of your Tablet PC or Pocket PC in either landscape or portrait modes.
Store all your annotations in a single location.
Zoom in to get a close-up view of graphics and pictures.
Call attention to a word or a passage, and find it any time.
Dictionary for looking up words as you read.
http://www.microsoft.com/reader/pc_reader.asp
5) PDF reader
No you can use the
adobe reader, but i won't suggest it. Its slow.
FoxIt reader is fast and much better
View or print PDF document
Basic PDF form operations i.e. filling out PDF forms and printing them out
Advanced PDF form operations, such as saving filled-out forms and import/export forms, free for personal usage only
View PDF as text
Critical add-ons, such as UI language package, JPEG2000/JBIG decoder, CJK package, GDI+ for early Windows version, etc
Foxit Software
6) C - display(Comic Reader)
Loads JPEG, PNG and static GIF images which are automatically ordered and presented for viewing one at a time or two at a time.
The images may be in a zip, rar, ace or tar archive file - no need to decompress before reading.
Page through the images sequentially and scroll around pages with single key presses.
Automatic page sizing: none; fit to screen, fit to width of screen, fit to width of screen if oversized, display at specific height, or display two pages. Resizing uses Lanczos interpolation for best picture quality.
Automatic colour balance and yellow reduction if desired.
No bloat caused by non-essential general purpose image processing features.
OldSite:
CDisplay Comic Reader
New Home:
CDisplay
7)
Comical (comic reader)
View one or two pages at a time
Fits pages to window, to width, to height, or to a percentage
Crisp image resizing provided by the FreeImage project
Intuitive interface
Opens CBR (RAR) and CBZ (ZIP) comic book archives
Opens directories of images
Displays JPEG, PNG, GIF, and TIFF images
Prefetches and caches pages for speed and responsiveness
Comical
8) isilo (pdb format reader)
pdb format reader(supports other formats also. Huge feature list. You can check out the feature list here
iSilo 3.0 features
Paid
Some of the best readers ofcourse are paid. But they give you full bang for your buck in most cases. Lets go through some
1)
µBook Reader
Renders .TXT, .RTF, .HTML, .PML, .PDB and .PRC (Non-Secure), files book-like.
Extracts text out of .PDF (Non-Secure) files.
Displays PRC, RTF and HTML images, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, .WMF (in RTF) or .BMP.
Opens text inside .ZIP, .CHM and .RB files, uncompressing paragraphs on the fly, limiting the amount of memory required (except CHM).
http://www.gowerpoint.com/uBook_feat.html#intro
(Price: 15$)
2)
ICE Book Reader Professional
ICE Book Reader Professional is the ultimate e-book reader. It is also possible to use ICE Book Reader Professional as a teleprompter. ICE Book Reader Professional is the first alternative e-book reader which includes native support for .LIT and .CHM files, and which does not utilize any Microsoft Reader or Microsoft HELP components. Also is possible to use ICE Book Reader Professional as file converter: TXT-HTML, HTML-TXT, TXT-DOC, DOC-TXT, PDB-TXT, LIT-TXT, FB2-TXT etc. with codepage conversion.
ICE Book Reader Professional is not only book reader. It's the powerful book database:
ICE Book Reader Professional allows to store books and to operate the information on them (up to 250000 books).
ICE Book Reader Professional allow ordering automatically a book collection. Just add some thousands unsorted books in ICE Book Reader Professional library for making completely ordered book collection with the minimal efforts.
ICE Book Reader Professional library is unique, because it stores all books as separate files. You can freely copy, delete or rename book files. But anyway ICE Book Reader Professional guarantees database integrity.
ICE Book Reader Professional uses the heterogeneous, distributed, failure safety database. It guarantees integrity of the data, even in case of physical damage of any amount of the data. Any other database in the world cannot do it.
ICE Book Reader Professional
(price 96$)
3)
TomeRaider
TomeRaider Windows is the ultimate windows based reference viewer. Have instant access to hundreds of megabytes of free reference content. There are thousands of FREE dictionaries, movie guides, bibles, novels and more in TomeRaider format.
TomeRaider is state of the art technology bringing unparalleled speed , power and functionality to any of the supported devices.
HTML Support: TR3 now supports pretty much HTML verbatim, making it even easier to make TR3 files.
Image support: Now images from the small to the massive can be displayed in TR3 files. Its about time.
The Filter Builder: Never before possible filters and queries can now be constructed by anyone.
Search Acceleration: Searching even tens of megabytes is now faster than you thought was possible.
Super Compression: TR2 was good, TR3 is even better. The files are smaller and they work faster.
TomeRaider is available for Windows , Palm OS, Pocket PC, Psion, Symbian, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.
Over 3,000 TomeRaider files are freely available, ranging from novels to encyclopaedia, dictionaries and religious texts.
TomeRaider - The ultimate cross-platform reference viewer & ebook reader for PC, Palm & PPC WM5 PDA's
price: 38$
To Be Continued....
*Feel Free to suggest alternatives. I will update the first post*
The Complete Ebook readers, convertors and devices thread
