Notices

Looking forward to my just ordered Nokia N900. It looks like I can find ways to do everything I want to do on it (versus my T-Mobile G1 and older iPhone) except ... read commercial ebooks. The G1 had eReader, and the iPhone had Kindle.

I just don't see the N900 as having the commercial penetration to attract ebook companies to it in the near future, do you? And I can't fall back to the usual hope that a Linux program could be built to work here; there aren't any for other Linuxes either.

So I'm just thinking about possibilities for getting a commercial ebook reader working on the N900 in the near future.

1. I understand that there is a PalmOS emulator. Does it work on the N900?

2. Is it possible for WINE to work well enough to get one of the PC readers working?

3. Could there be some kind of Symbian emulator in the works for the N900? (ereader runs on Symbian)

4. (longshot) I understand the Android apps are written in a Java-like language. I wonder if a real Java version of eReader could be made, and then run on the N900? Is there Java support here?

fb reader works just fine. though atm i think there is no way to read drm-corrupted mobipockets.

Hence the "commercial" in the title, but I guess I should have been more specific and said "DRM'd"

That's the problem. You can read a large selection of e-book protocols, but nothing with DRM. That goes for mobipocket, palm - whatever I think.

DRM will apparently be a choice in Maemo 6 ... but in my case, I'll never buy DRM content or a platform where I can't disable it.

Re (2) wine: see the link in my signature.

Most of us actually find the lack of DRM support a feature, but i understand not everyone feels that way. Check the thread on libraries for fbreader in off topic for many many countless many free options.

Palm emulation is the way to go. On the n810 i ran mobi reader using the Palm emulator (was it called GarnetVM?). And those had drm.

Thank you - that's really useful to know. I have a bunch of palm DRM reader files, and at a push would be glad to read them that way.

Thanks, Flandry. I hadn't really thought the WINE-thing through; of course the processor is wrong.

Garnet VM works pretty darn well with eReader books; I just followed the instructions here:

http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/6...he-nokia-n900/

However, the ONE book I really wanted to read doesn't install properly, although several others, including larger ones do, dammit. Guess I'll have to talk to eReader about it (and maybe pretend I'm still using my old Treo 650).

Update: spoke too soon. I can read a book as long as the Garnet VM session is open. When I kill it and reopen I have to reauthorize the books! Looking for a way to get it to work properly ...

And I've opened a tech support email session with eReader about the book that won't open.