[LMB] OT: question about Baen book dowloads

[Michael Bauminger]

On Sunday, Jul 01, 2007 7:53 PM, Jean Lamb
<tlambs1138 at charter.net> wrote:

> When I download some books from Baen, either from the
> Free Library or my little Liaden orgy, I discover that
> when I download them using the format for Palm Pilot as
> my choice, that the book show up on my Tungsten with all
> the html markings written out.

The Baen "Palm" format is actually the Mobipocket format.
You really need the Mobipocket E-Book Reader application to
read this format. (There is a Mobipocket Reader for the PC
and for just about all mobile devices - Palm, Windows
Mobile, Symbian, and Blackberry.) You can download the
latest version of this software here:
http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/default.asp?Language=EN

The software installs on your PC, then there is a menu
choice in the PC software to set up a mobile device. Once
you do that, you sync your Palm to your PC to install the
software on the Palm. At that point, you should have
Mobipocket on your Palm, and it should be able to read the
files you have on the device (or on the expansion card, if
you have one, as long as the files are in the proper
folders).

What is nice about the Mobipocket format is that it displays
bold and italic, which the Palm plain text readers do not.

> I find this annoying, frankly. I am tempted to pull them
> into Word (which reads HTML just fine), save as a word
> document, and read them as word documents instead.

You cannot pull the Mobipocket format books into Word, but
you can pull the HTML or RTF format books into Word. Or if
you are reading on your PC, you can use Microsoft Reader and
the .Lit format books.

-- Michael