Plucker is very cool
I’ve read ebooks and other content on my PocketPC for a while but a
few things about the experience have never worked quite how I’d like.
- Not enough content There are .lit files and other portable
document formats available from Project Gutenberg, but for
interesting, contemporary sources, you really need to roll your
own. - Content generation is a pain. The overdrive software to
convert Word documents into MS Reader files is way more complicated
than it ought to be. Mobile favorites in IE frequently don’t work,
don’t synchronize correctly, and don’t give you enough flexibility to
control spidering. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were more high
quality content sources. - The reading experience is frequently poor Pocket Reader
generally works pretty well, but its library organization could be
improved, I would like more features (my screen is already small
enough - I don’t need margins the size of a real book), and other free
systems seem no better.
The answer to my prayers seems to have come in the format of
desktop and mobile application platform for reading offline content.
It was originally designed for Palm and the Plucker application only
runs on Palm but if you have a PocketPC, you can use
to support Plucker files just fine. Plucker doesn’t the paucity of
content issue - though sites like
format downloads. But it is at least generally at the level of
quality for available content sources. Where it excels is in content
generation and the application experience.
Using the Sunrise
Desktop (the successor to JPluck which, in my limited estimation,
seems superior to Plucker Desktop), I can easily create a subscription
to, say, Slate or the Slate RSS
feed, edit my subscription to follow links n deep, set constraints
about going off of slate.com (including which sites I want to allow or
disallow), set constraints about which paths on slate.com I want
crawled and whether or not to get images, and control the subscription
schedule (date/time/frequency). I could also apply a transform to the
documents, opening the possibility that some day I write the hack that
turns all the slate page links into the printable page link and get an
add-free portable library of the current content. And the reader
application gives me basically all the flexibility I want but am not
getting from Pocket Reader.
The whole combination is great and if you have a PocketPC, I really
recommend it.