Russ has raved about FBReader, an ebook reader for Maemo, in the past. I had installed it before and tried it out, but had problems with the format of the books. He walked me through the stuff he was doing and gave me his FBReader config files, I’ve been trying it out since. I still have format problems, unordered lists in HTML seem to become just mashed up text without and formatting. Which was what really turned me off about it before cause it’s normally the first thing I see. But I’ve grabbed a few HTML based books and read a ways into them (seeing as how I’ve spent the last week lying on the couch rolling around in some half conscious state of delirium, it seemed like a good use of time). There are still some formatting quirks later on, but normally most of the nastyness is up at the start.
Here’s a shot of FBReader running on my N800, with the screen rotated and all so that pretty much the equivalent of a “small paperback” worth of text fits on the screen. It works out pretty well. I’ve grabbed a few online novels from random places, but most of my downloads have been from Project Gutenberg. The site is pretty usable from the built in browser. I select the compressed HTML version of the book whenever it’s available, and compressed plain text when not. Lots of them have three or four pages of unformatted cruft before the book starts, but once you make it past the table of contents the books are pretty readable.
