Now that I work at home (and yes, I’ve been incredibly lazy… where are the new posts? ahem… any day now ), I’ve discovered something about myself: I don’t like to read stuff on my computer.

Sure, I do a lot of that, anyway, but, for instance, there are a lot of blogs that I have subscribed in Bloglines… only I usually skip them. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the content of those blogs – I do. I simply tend, repeatedly, to find excuses, other things I’d rather do at the time, and so on. However, I love to read them in other places – in bed, in a café, and so on. Whenever I’m alone, with nothing to do, and away from a computer.

Reading them in a mobile phone or PDA, then, is the logical answer (a laptop is still much too “PC-like”, with all its myriad distractions; when you can do everything, sometimes it’s hard to focus on just what you need to actually do). I currently use a Nokia 6630, which I’ve had for more than a year. I’ve tried several aggregators, and also the mobile Bloglines, which is accessed through a web browser such as Opera, and, while they work well, they’re too slow and cumbersome for my tastes. Therefore, I used a combination of newspipe (to convert posts from feeds to email messages) and Profimail (to access a mailbox through IMAP). Recently, I’ve dumped newspipe for rss2email, for reasons I’ll mention in a future post, and that’s what I have right now.

I’ve been considering other possibilities, though. As I said, a laptop isn’t a good idea here. I’d mostly like something a little bigger than the 6630, with a larger and better screen, and possibly a QWERTY keyboard (to do annotations and so on). The Nokia E61 seems to fit the bill (and it supports Wi-Fi, which would save me a lot of money in phone bills), though I wouldn’t like to spend too much money (after all, it’s mostly a luxury – I can keep using the 6630, or even battle my distaste for reading on the PC). A PocketPC (are they still called that, these days?) PDA might also do the trick, though the ones I saw recently would cost an arm and a leg (really, 800 euros!? what are they thinking?).

So, any suggestions / tips?

(NOTE: this is part of the “Software I like” series)

          

The MobiPocket Reader is the software I use for reading ebooks in my Series 60 cell phones (the 6630 and the N-Gage). (there are also Palm, PocketPC, UIQ, Windows SmartPhone and Windows desktop versions)

Contrary to what you may think, reading ebooks in your mobile phone is perfectly fine, and fully readable without tiring out your eyes – not as pleasant, certainly, as a real book made of paper, but, on the other hand, you tend to bring your cell phone anywhere and have it with you all the time. And it can easily hold 10-20 books or more, with a mere 128MB card. When I go on holidays, I usually bring a bag of books; this summer, I just brought my 6630, with the “Autumn” series by David Moody, plus, of course, the Zombie Survival Guide (don’t leave home without it!)

MobiPocket don’t just make the reader – they’re also an ebook store. I’ve bought many books there – they have a lot of fantasy and science fiction, and prices are usually lower than those of the “dead trees” versions.