N800 as e-book reader

Greetings --

I'm interested in using the N800 as a reader for the vast collections of 
scanned books that are starting to appear online through organizations 
associated with the Open Content Alliance and through Google Book Search.

At the Internet Archive (IA), we currently have 147,000 public domain books 
available for free downloading and reading.  Google won't disclose how many 
volumes it's made available in downloadable pdf form, but it looks as if there 
are certainly several hundreds of thousands of books there.  This poses a great 
opportunity for tablet users.

With regard to our IA books, we offer a number of formats.  Let's use this 1931 
book on television as an example:

http://www.archive.org/details/televisionitsmet00felirich

If you look on the left side of the page, you'll see that we offer DjVu, PDF, 
and .txt (all downloadable and readable offline), and what we call the 
"FlipBook," an interactive reader that requires an online connection.

The FlipBook works fine with my N800 through the browser, so that is basically 
no problem. 

What I'd like to do is figure out how to make the PDFs more usable.  Though 
mid-size PDFs (under 8 or 10 MB) work ok with the bundled PDF reader, it takes 
as many as 30 sec., sometimes more, to turn a page.  I gather this is a memory 
management issue.  In fact, until I enabled VM, it was impossible to open a 
PDF.  (However, I have no problem playing a 221 MB video file through the media 
player.)

Would anyone have any thoughts about how to improve PDF handling?  I would 
prefer to avoid DjVu, if at all possible.  If there was a way to optimize PDF 
Reader, I think we have a wonderful e-book platform here.

Thanks, and all best
Rick
-- 

Rick Prelinger
Prelinger Archives    http://www.prelinger.com
P.O. Box 590622, San Francisco, Calif. 94159-0622 USA
footage@xxxxxxxxx

Board President, Internet Archive
rick@xxxxxxxxxxx

Prelinger Library:  http://www.prelingerlibrary.org

NEW: Prelinger Library Digital Collections
http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger_library