Mobipocket - An Awesome ebook Reader Which is Free

Jul. 28th, 2008 By Abhijeet Mukherjee

I'm a big fan of ebooks and have a huge collection of ebooks on various topics. Although I don't read them on my cellphone now but later in this year when I plan to travel extensively, I'd definitely like to have the access to my ebooks collection on my phone and read them on the go.

While I was searching for ebook reading softwares online, I came across Mobipocket which is a free ebook reader provided by the Mobipocket.com ebook store. It works only on Windows PC and also works on mobile phones like Smartphones, Blackberry and on devices like PDA.

I decided to download it and test it out and I should say that it's certainly an impressive product. Once you download the 5.3 MB .msi file and install it on your PC, it searches for the available ebooks and creates your personal library. If you have your ebooks stored in a separate partition then you'll have to manually import them.

When you go to the import option, you'll find that it's not just about ebooks but also about office documents, HTML and text documents. Hence this ebook reader aims to be a store of all your readable documents, which makes it more useful. While importing I'd suggest you to select the All Supported Files option and then import the required documents. It converts the document into the mobipocket format and stores it in a new folder named My ebooks created inside My Documents.

If you look at the left hand side column in this ebook reader, you've got options like ebooks, eNews, eBooks store, eNews store etc. The ebook store lets you buy ebooks from a number of online stores like mobipocket.com, fictionwise.com, the bookgap.com and many more. There is a Change Store Option on the top which lets you change the store at one click. The screenshot at the beginning of this post gives you a glance of the Mobipocket.com store.

One of the coolest features of this product is that it allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds of various online news magazines which include PC Mag, TIME, BBC News online, USA today and many more. You can also customize the display options to list view or newspaper view and have a better reading experience.

Although Mobipocket's main task is to organize your digital text at one place so that you can easily read them and then send them to your mobile phone when required, it goes beyond just being an ebook and news reader and has many functions. You can customize the way you read ebooks, be it the font size, the layout, the background color, scrolling or the screen orientation. It also works for Microsoft Office files, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and RTF TXT files.

Furthermore, you can easily sync and transfer your digital text by connecting your blackberry, smartphone or PDA to your PC. It also lets you annotate, highlight or bookmark any part of the ebook and when you sync it with your mobile phone, the annotations get synced too ( see screenshot below ). And finally it has a cool dictionary search option which gives you a one click dictionary lookup in all the documents.

Overall, I found this tool to be very useful especially for ebook and RSS lovers like me. Those who travel a lot and love reading on their mobile phone would certainly appreciate this tool and it's wonderful features. If you know of any other such ebook reader which you've been using and found very useful, then please do let us know in the comments section.