A look at the new Palm eBook Studio software

By Planet eBook Editor
May 31, 2002

Last week Palm Digital Media announced the release of its new Palm eBook Studio publishing software for personal use -- that is for people to make Palm Reader compatible eBooks for them or their friends devices but not for them to sell. This week Planet eBook took a bit of a look at the software to see how it performed.

The fundamental benefits appear to be that it turns Palm Digital Media's existing (free) DropBook tool into a WSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, meaning people unfamiliar with markup languages can format the content much as they would with a word processing program, and the other is that it allows you view eBooks prior to transfering them to your handheld, meaning it reduces the to-ing and fro-ing typical with eBooks that can't be viewed on the computer you are producing them one.

The major issues some users may have are that once in Palm eBook Studio the formatting becomes quite manual and that, because it tries to mimick exactly how it would look in Palm Reader, it is hard to work on more than one or two paragraphs at a time. Unlike the major WSIWYG editors like Word, the search and replace is relavtively basic so it is not easy to do quick formatting of a large document. To Palm Digital Media's defence it doesn't over-market the fact you can easily publish large eBooks, it tends to talk about its usefulness for publishing smaller electronic texts like newsletters. If you're not comfortable with marking up an eBook then I'd recommend only taking on small texts, or texts that need barely any formatting.

As a user familiar with HTML though, overall the program seems worth having for when I want to read an eBook with Palm Reader. By taking an HTML-based eBook and then replacing the HTML tags with the appropriate Palm Markup tags I was quickly able to prepare an eBook which included chapters and headings.

By renaming the HTML file as a PML and opening it Palm eBook Studio I was able to give the eBook a good lookover before I got it into my handheld only to notice the odd formatting blip.

One oddity, which may we be OS-related (Windows XP), was that trying to open my 500K formatted PML file took more than ten minutes (on both XP computers). In fact, I've heard from another user (on Windows 2000) that he was able to open an even larger file without a problem.

If you're a Palm Reader enthusiast, this software is certainly worth a look. It would be nice if Palm Digital Media made a demo version available.

See also Jeff Kirvin's review at infoSync.