I don’t have an iPhone. I also don’t have a Blackberry. I have a cell phone. A plain, boring old cell phone. Well, it’s a slider, if that makes it seem more exciting. I use it for very advanced things, such as placing phone calls, and most importantly, playing Tetris whilst in the can. You can only play so many rounds of Tetris before it starts to get a little, well, boring as hell. So if I could read a book instead, that would be superior. If I could add several of these “books” to my always-handy cell phone, so much the better. Waiting rooms, train rides, performing surgery. But alas, where to begin?
Right here. First things first- I love to assume, so I will assume everyone reading this has the exact type of phone, exact type of computer, and the exact same taste in reading. Now that that’s settled, here’s my gear, so you can gauge how incorrect you are from the beginning:
Samsung SGH-T629 Slider phone, branded from T-Mobile. I got more.
Random Taiwan-made Bluetooth USB key with no logo visible. Ordered online for $10 from some random Taiwan Bluetooth reseller.
Obviously if your computer is Bluetooth-equipped, you won’t need this. Mine is a dinosaur, and needs extra doodads like this to keep up with modern day thingamabobs. You can also use a direct cable if you have it- I don’t and didn’t want to have to order one. Bluetooth will work with just about any modern cell phone, so that seemed to me the easiest way to go.
I’m also using Windows XP SP3. The methods described below should work with 2000/XP and most likely Vista, but I have no way of testing it myself.
Initially you want to make sure your Bluetooth connection is working with your phone. This can be a fine art or it can be dead easy, it just depends on your Bluetooth device and what Windows thinks about it. I found a terrific guide here:
http://www.ehow.com/how_2244416_phone-computer-using-blue-tooth.html
So if you can successfully send a file from your computer to your phone, we’re good to go at this point. If you can’t, check out the above link and see if it can guide you to the right direction.
Now, download the excellent Tequilacat Book Reader. Once you unzip it to your specified directory (there is no installation process, just run and go), download these plugins to the plugins folder:
http://tequilacat.org/dev/br/plugins/gettext.zip (extract the contents to the plugins folder)
http://tequilacat.org/dev/br/plugins/ha.exe (simply copy this file to the plugins folder)
These plugins will allow the reader to accept e-books written as html files, word documents, pdfs, Power Point presentations and more.
Don’t have any e-books ready to be sent to your phone yet? Then might I suggest Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, which you won’t have to pay a dime for. I’ll let Cory explain it in his own words:
[My book, Little Brother, is] licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. Some people don’t understand why I do this — so check out this post if you want my topline explanation for why I do this crazy thing.
We’ll use this book as our first example so you can compare how they look along they way. It’s also a fast and fun read. Once you pick out your format of choice (I’d go with plain text for your initial attempt. Might as well make this as painless as possible), download it and save it to your computer.
Now fire up Tequilacat’s Book Reader by double-clicking “Shell.exe” in the main directory.
You can select your phone model under the pulldown menu on the top right. My exact model wasn’t there, but a generic version was. It lists it as MIDP 2.0, but I wasn’t sure if my phone was MIDP 1.0 or 2.0 or even what the hell MIDP stood for. I found out more info here:
http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=1048
I noticed also that the screen resolution was 176 x 220. Take note of what your phone’s screen size is, if possible.
Okay, go back to the Book Reader and select your phone. Click on the next step, Configure Books.
Click on Add Book, and select your recently-saved text file.
Now you can make changes as we go along- just hit “Reload Books” in order to see any successive changes. I like to split the text by chapters, which is the option at the top left. Once you’re done, go on to the next step - fonts and colors.
This is a pretty important step. This is what you’re going to be staring at for the next few hours any time you have some idle time and you pull out your nifty new e-book / cell phone. Try to make the text as comfortably large, legible, and easy on the eyes as possible. I’ve chosen to invert the black and white colors, so I’m viewing white text on black background. I’ve also chosen Lucida Sans Console at 17 points, which for me, is a nice, large, soothing typeface. I also rotate the font to the left, which means that instead of reading a book on a very narrow, long device, I read it sideways- on a very wide, yet short device. It makes reading feel more natural to me, and it can fit more words on a single line.
Also note under the tab Screen Size- remember before about noting the resolution? This is so you can max out the space available to you.
Experiment heavily with all of these options. You can add several fonts to this one book (actually called a MIDlet, which will be the final product), but to cut down on size you eventually will want to find one solid contender and stick with it. Lucida Sans Console is my Rocky Balboa font. You can also adjust padding and how much space is in between each line.
The next step is to set the path and properties.
The first check box asks what the maximum JAR size is. Huh?
The Book Reader will eventually create two programs: a JAR file and a JAD file. What are those? Sun’s developers pipe in:
The basic components of any MIDlet suite you will deliver are the Java Application Descriptor (JAD) file and the Java Archive (JAR) file. Together, these two items are the MIDlet suite.
Back to the max JAR size- why is this relevant? Because for some unknown reason, some phones (mine included) fart horrific brain-melting errors if a file too large is on the phone and attempting to install itself. Through random trial and error, I have determined that my particular phone’s memory limit is 256 kilobytes. I have a memory card in mine that stores a gigabyte of data, but for whatever reason, this plays no factor into how big of a file you can transfer for purposes of creating a MIDlet.
So the book reader asks for the max size- in bytes. I ask Google how big 256 kilobytes is in bytes.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=256+kilobytes+in+bytes&btnG=Search
It answers that it is 262,144 bytes. So that is what I typed into this field. The largest file size it will create will be 256 kilobytes. You can experiment with this too- try different amounts or even leaving it unchecked entirely. If you get an error later, reduce this to the number above or even half of that (131,072).
I changed the JAR compression level to the “Best” which will hopefully cram as much data in as few files as possible. I only want to create as many MIDlets as I have to.
Make sure “Create JAD files” is checked. You’ll need this to install the JAR file it’s going to make. I also typed in the name of the book and the name of my desired file name. You can do this at any point during this process. Next, go to step five: Set Up Java Book.
The only thing I changed here was to turn the backlight off. I can still see on my phone, and it saves a little juice. You can also password protect your books, but I’m not sure how secure it would be. It even says explicitly that if it fell into the wrong hands you would not be safe, so I don’t think you should trust it with your deepest darkest secrets.
Number six will let you redefine the keys.
Now, when you right click on one of the fields to see all of the options, the choice “Left” means the left direction as you are reading your book. So if you, like me, chose an orientation where your phone is on its side, the “left” could be the original “down” or “up,” depending on which side you placed it. The directions given are from your reading vantage, just remember that.
Although step 7 would logically be our last stop, it’s not necessary. I’m not sure how to set up the “send to phone” feature directly with this, but perhaps you can figure it out.
Once you’re all done, you can compile the book. On the bottom right, click on the cell phone / book icon. You should see a blue progress bar and a text readout of what just happened. If you matched my settings, you would see:
Now you transfer both the JAR files and the JAD files to your phone. With a Samsung, using Bluetooth, all files wind up in the following location:
Menu > Fun & Apps > My Files > Other files > Other files
If you select either type of file, you just get a menu to delete or move them. This is not what we want. We want it to install them. T-mobile has handicapped their branded phones by default to not install JAR files. You can bypass this with a key entry, and it will remain active until the phone is turned off. The key will have to be entered again if you ever shut the phone down. This may seem a little crazy, but you can search this string in Google and see that it is legitimate. You type in the following keys after exiting completely out of the menu you were just in:
*#9998*52824678255#
A message should pop up saying “Activated.” Now you can re-visit that menu from above (Other files) and select a JAD file. It will prompt you to install the book. Say yes.
Once you have used all relevant JAD files to install your JAR files, you can delete the JAR and JAD files in your Other files directory. They are of no longer any use to you. The completed books are somewhere else. Let’s find them.
Menu > Fun & Apps > Games (huh?) > My games
At the very bottom, you should see a new entry or two. New, shiny book-like entries. Click on one and you should see your new book in its tiny, electronic glory.
Other programs to try:
http://www.deep-shadows.com/hax/ReadManiac/index.htm
http://bookshelf.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
http://www.my-symbian.com/uiq/software/applications.php?faq=5&fldAuto=665
Find an easier way? Share it in the comments.
