The Palm was designed as an electronic organizer, but if that were all it did, far fewer people would carry one. Every Palm (or Visor) user cites a different reason for finding her PDA indispensable. For me, it's reading. I use the Palm as an organizer, but I love it as an e-text reader. I used to lug around a knapsack full of heavy books and three ring binders wherever I went. Now, I always carry work related manuals, several short stories, and at least one novel on my Palm IIIC.

You can buy current bestsellers from online publishers like Peanut Press (recently acquired by Palm) or download stories from web sites like Aportis.com or PalmGear. But to truly exploit your Palm as an e-reader, you'll want to make your own books. It's easy, it's free, and there is a wealth of material available.

The first thing you need is a book you want to read. If you are really ambitious, you can scan a book and use OCR software to translate the scans into text. Or, you can let HOST Comp David do that for you. Every week he uploads new texts to the AOL etext libraries. Go to Keyword: Etext and search for the book you want to read. If you can't find the book you want, try expanding your search online. There are two extraordinary sources for locating texts on the internet. The University of Virginia's online library ( http://etext.virginia.edu/ebooks/ebooklist.html ) is quite extensive and many of the books are already in Palm doc format. The University of Pennsylvania maintains a clickable index of all books freely available online in either plain text or HTML ( http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ )

Once you've located your book, you need to save it to your PC's hard drive. On AOL's toolbar or the toolbar of your browser, click on "File" then click on "Save." If you are using MS Internet Explorer 5.x, you can choose whether to save the file as a Complete Web Page, Web Archive, HTML only, or text. Choose either "HTML Only" or "Text." Make sure you follow any links for longer pieces (each chapter may have its own page). Be sure that each file has its own name - don't blindly accept Internet Explorer's suggestions. For longer works, it is helpful to number the sections if that is not already done in the title. For instance, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 is easy to piece together later. "Buses," "Trains," "Automobiles" may not be so easy to arrange in the correct order. It is also helpful, for longer pieces, to create a new folder named for the book you are translating and to save the files in that folder.

Now the book is on your PC. The next step is making it a Palm document. There are many tools for doing this. One of the oldest, and still the best, is MakeDocW (freely available in the AOL PDA software library or from the author at http://www.pierce.de/ ).

You will have to decide how fussy you are about line breaks, spacing, and hard carriage returns on your Palm. MakeDocW has a "Remove CR" and a "Remove LF" function. They work, but not sufficiently well on downloaded text for my taste. I am very fussy - I want clean line wraps and single spacing. I'll outline what I do to remove hard returns, but feel free to ignore these steps.

I save downloaded texts in their native format. That is, if the text from an online source is HTML, then I save it as HTML. If it is plain text, I save it as .txt. Next, I open it in MS Word and "Save as…" Plain Text. This removes the line breaks, HTML tags, JavaScript, etc. While the document is open in Word, I run the spell checker (you'd be surprised at what turns up) and check for formatting oddities like triple spacing or oddball punctuation. If the spacing is especially eccentric, using Word's "Auto Format as General Document" may be necessary. In most instances, however, using MakeDocW's switches will be sufficient.

Look at your final .txt file in Word one more time. If it shows no spacing between paragraphs and no odd spacing at the end of lines, you've successfully saved your document as text and removed all the hard returns. When you've got a nice, clean text with no line wrapping, open MakeDocW. The main Convert tab has a "Browse" button. Click on it and navigate to the document you want to convert. Single click on the file name and the click the "Open" button. Back in the MakeDocW window, name your document as you want it to appear on your Palm. For instance, if you are converting The Gettysburg Address, "The Gettysburg Address" would probably be a good name. But if you are converting, say, Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln, you'd want to name the chapters in such a way that they are easily identified., e.g, Lincoln Ch1, Lincoln Ch 2, etc. Five chapters all named "Lincoln" won't work: you can't tell which is which, and some doc readers will just overwrite identically named files, treating them as updates of the same chapter. Keep the title short and simple. The Palm's display will truncate long names.

Now look at MakeDocW's Line Breaks tab. Click the "None" radio buttons for both "CR/LF Removal" and "CR/LF Translation." On the Advanced tab, be sure "Ignore single line breaks" is unchecked. In the "Pilot File Extension" box, change prc to pdb. Return to the Convert tab and click on the "Convert" button. Assuming you've checked the "Auto Install" check box, the file will be installed on your Palm the next time you HotSync.

But what if your .txt file, during that final Word double check, showed a single space between every paragraph? This will appear on the Palm as a double space between paragraphs. It can be easily remedied using MakeDocW's "Remove CR/LF" option. On the Line Break tab, click the "Remove CR" radio button under "Remove CR/LF." You can leave the "None" button checked under "Translate CR/LF." All other steps remain the same.

If you follow these steps, you'll have a Palm document with neatly wrapped lines, no matter what size font you use for reading. You'll have a single space between paragraphs. The text will flow cleanly and be easy to follow with your eyes.

Finally, if you don't already have one, you'll need a document reader on your PDA to view your new e-text. There are literally dozens available. One of the best is a freeware reader called CSpotRun. You can find it in the AOL PDA software library or from the author at http://32768.com/bill/palmos/cspotrun/index.html

A version of this article appeared in Pocket Press, a weekly newsletter for PDA users.

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