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Plucker Pros
Free Reader Free Converter Open Source Software Makes very small files Supports hypertext links, images, bold and italic text Works on other platforms besides Windows |
Plucker Cons
Book requires user click a link periodically during reading. Readers autoscrolling is not smooth (on my old slow PDA) Page turning doesn't flip even number of lines. Doesn't read DOC files (but it isn't really meant to) |
Plucker is a great ebook solution for several reasons. First and foremost it is open source software. This means it is free. It always has been free and always will be free. It also means even the source code is free. It is a truly open format. Proprietary formats only hinder progress. That is one of the problems with ebooks on hand helds at this time. Everyone wants you to use their format. This means there are too many formats and it makes everything confusing.
The ebooks Plucker makes are also of excellent quality. They support special character formatting, pictures and tables, hyperlinks, etc. Everything you need for a nice ebook. All the tools you need to generate ebooks with Plucker are also free as is the reader for Plucker. It is also not tied to Windows allowing you to use it on different operating systems.
How to make Plucker ebooks in Windows.
Step 1
Download the software from the Plucker Website.
Click here to get there.
The file you want to download is the latest version of Plucker dektop for windows. At the time I write this, that is version 1.6.2.0
Step 2
Run the Plucker installation. Installing Plucker is very straight forward.
If you don't have the Plucker reader on your handheld device you will need to install it as well.
Step 3
Plucker creates its files from HTML or text documents. All you need to do is find such a document using Windows Explorer and click on the document with your right mouse button. A menu will pop up and one of the options on the menu will be 'Convert to Plucker'. Click it.
Plucker will open a DOS window and do the conversion.
Also keep in mind that if you have a document in another format that you would like to convert, like a Microsoft Word document or an RTF file for example, all you need to do is to a save it as an HTML or text file using another application like OpenOffice and then you can easily convert it to Plucker just by clicking on the file with your right mouse button.
Step 4
In the folder where the original document was there will now be a new document. It will have the same name, but instead of a txt, htm, or html extension it will have a pdb extension added to the end of the file name. 
This is your Plucker ebook. Double click the file and it will get loaded into Hotsync manager automatically.
Step 5
Do a HotSync.
Step 6
Read your book in Plucker!
It doesn't get much easier.
