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One of the drawbacks of changing jobs at the end last year was that it effectively doubled my daily commute. I now spend about three hours a day either going to or coming home from work, with most of that time being spent riding crowded buses and ridiculously overcrowded trains. For the first few months, I tried to make the most of this downtime by reading books, but that proved rather difficult—especially in the case of thick, technical books, which are the kind I read most. It’s actually a bit difficult to find room to even open a book on a rush hour train (this is even true for paperbacks, unfortunately).

So when I got an announcement about the ability to download chapters from books on my Safari Bookshelf, I immediately saw it as a great opportunity to read books on my PDA on the way to and from work. I’m pleased to report that it works really well, although it took a while to get everything set up. Here’s a quick look at what was involved.

Hello, Clie
My two-year-old Cassiopeia has a number of nice features, but one thing it doesn’t have is the ability to read PDF files. After considering a number of different options, I decided to get a Sony Clie for my commuter reading. The Clie is smaller and slimmer than the Cassiopeia, which is pretty small itself. I’ve been very pleased with the Palm OS so far, but a little less pleased with Clie’s Memory Stick requirement. Fortunately I have card readers at home and at work that handle just about any type of flash memory, but I already have plenty of SD memory cards, CF cards, and SmartMedia cards, so I wasn’t really excited about buying a Memory Stick just to use the Clie. On the upside, though, the 64MB card I purchased will be used exclusively with the Clie, which should enable me to carry about a hundred or so PDF files at any given time—a veritable library in my pocket.

Another thing I really like about the Clie is how crisp the screen is. It’s really easy to read. The fact that the screen is backlit makes it possible to read even in dark places, like when I’m waiting at the bus stop at night. Yeah, I know, it’s probably not very good for my eyes, but when has reading ever been good for your eyes?

Going with RepliGo
To convert PDFs for viewing on the palm-size screen of my PDA, I need software that will resize the document and structure it for easy reading. RepliGo 2.0 fits the bill perfectly. I’ve been considerably impressed by this software for its remarkable ease of use and its no-nonsense utility. (Thanks for recommending it, Andrew!)

Let’s talk tokens
Safari Bookshelf subscribers can upgrade their accounts to come with a specified number of monthly “tokens,” which can be used to download chapters from Safari titles. In general, one token can be exchanged for one chapter of any book on the subscriber’s shelf (some chapters may cost more than one token, others may cost less). Additional tokens can be purchased in sets of five for $10. This is perhaps a bit expensive if you consider the fact that it could be cheaper to buy hard copies of some titles than to download them chapter by chapter as individual PDF files, but $2.00 a chapter really isn’t all that much to pay for the convenience of not having to wait for a hard copy to be shipped—and not having to lug around books that are several hundred pages thick! I imagine I will soon be buying a lot more books this way, both for strain it will save on my back and the space it will save on my (physical) bookshelf.

The only thing I really need to be careful about is not letting myself become so engrossed in my reading that I miss my stop.