A new site called Books in my Phone could prove useful to those of us who don’t want to carry around an expensive e-reader.
All titles are free to download and install on your phone. You can browse the available books by Author or Title; or you can pull up lists of classics through their classification: Adventure, Biography, Memoir, Comedy, Satire, Fantasy, Historical, Fiction, Mystery, Horror, Mythology, Non Fiction, Philosophy, Political, Romance, SciFi, Short Works, or Miscellaneous.
Once on your phone you can choose the size of font and easily page forwards or backwards, skip from one chapter to another, choose day or night mode to discover which is easiest on your eyes, and when you’re ready to quit, the program bookmarks the page you last read. If you have an incoming call while reading, the text will be paused so you can answer the call, and when you hang up the text will automatically appear again so you can carry on reading.
The Contemporary Works section only contained one author I’d heard of, but the classics section was overflowing with Dickens, Ibsen, Wollstonecraft, Tolstoy, Twain, Nietsche, Gaskell, Kant, Austen and Robert Louis Stevenson, to name but a few.
Almost all of the books are out of copyright. But the site only allows you to download those that are free of copyright in your area of the world.
You can download to your computer and then transfer the texts to your phone, or, if your mobile can browse the internet you can download directly to the phone. Cranford, literally, took me a couple of minutes to download and install.
Oh, and the Help department came back swiftly to my plea for a couple of minor problems I had. While I shall not use the system extensively because of the smallness of the mobile’s screen, it does represent a useful resource. I expect to use it when travelling short distances and at those unexpected moments when I find myself alone with coffee.
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to my RSS feed
Subscribe to posts
Dec 28th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Thanks for this. I’ve written to ask if they’d like to include MORTAL GHOST.
jb says: What a good idea, Lee. Keep us in the picture.
Dec 28th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
“Cranford” is a very good choice!
I must say that, if I was travelling a short distance, I would spend my time observing the people around me or looking out of the window. Also, the small phone’s screen would detract quite a bit from the pleasure of reading.
jb says: We’ll see, May. I’m in experimental mode at the moment.
Jan 9th, 2008 at 6:08 am
Hi John. I must say that the people running the site are very cooperative and efficient. The only minor problem is that some of my special formatting has been lost.
Here’s the MORTAL GHOST link:
http://www.booksinmyphone.com/index.php?author=L.%20Lee%20Lowe
jb says: Thanks for the update, Lee. It’s good to see your novel up there so quickly.