Kickin' it Old School #tags Palm,Ebooks,Ereader,Plucker


Going through my desk drawers recently I came across my 10-year old
Palm IIIe [0]. I threw some batteries in it, and lo and behold it
still worked fine. Luckily, Palm connectivity under Linux was stable
ten years ago [1] - five minutes and a USB-to-serial converter
later, I was installing plucker [2] and some of Cory Doctorow's
novels [3]. Here is what it looks like [4].

Despite the small screen (160x160), it's actually nicer to read
ebooks on this than any backlit-LCD screen of today (although the
Palm IIIe does have a cool illuminated-green-text "backlight", I
don't use it as it tends to eat batteries rather quickly).

The Palm IIIe interface is very fast and will hold 4-5 full-length
novels in plucker format. This isn't a lot by today's standards, but
it only takes a few minutes to swap them out for new ones. I can
download any book from project Gutenberg in plucker format for free,
and can convert other books from HTML format right from the web with
plucker-build (until commercial ebooks come without DRM, I won't be
buying any, nor will I lock myself into one platform as with the
Kindle).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_IIIe
[1] http://www.jpilot.org
[2] http://www.plkr.org
[3] http://craphound.com/?cat=5
[4] http://slugmax.sdf.org/images/palmiiie.jpg