The main reason I bought my T2 Palm handheld was to read all my Project Gutenberg eBooks. I've downloaded over a hundred, and these are all books I really want to read.

So this weekend's project is to figure out how to do that.

The first hurdle... the Palm can read txt files, but the app that reads txt files, MemoPad, can only handle 4k of text. uh huh, I've got poems to read that are longer than that!

Next, try out a PDF file. As an experiment, I try converting and moving the Palm handbook which is in pdf format on my computer. It makes it's way to the Palm, but I can't open the file. crud.

Then I happened to run into a little free program called DropBook. But you have to type in your own Palm Markup Language tags... just like making an html page. Easy to learn but quite tedious.

I started with a short essay, Mark Twain's "On the Decay of the Art of Lying". :) Then I made a file for a novella I enjoy, Abbott's Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions. I got creative with the ASCII pictures that are included in the text... made them up as PNGs and now I've got my first illustrated eBook.

Yeah, too bad I didn't actually write the book, or illustrate it.

I enjoyed myself, but onward and upward. On the search for a real program to help me easily convert txts into something Palm readable.