I work in publishing and have been involved with e-books since 1999.

This last year I obtained a Nokia 770 internet tablet, a lightweight, PDA-sized Linux computer and began using its open-source e-reader, FBReader.[1]

This program has versions for several small devices, as well as one for desktop Linux. As I've been drawn into learning Khmer, I've wondered about getting FBReader to display e-texts in Khmer.

So this week I attempted to install FBReader in Ubuntu as well as the Khmer OS fonts (ttf). Being as much a beginner in Linux as I am in Khmer, this isn't a trivial task for me, but I am optimistic.

FBReader handles Unicode comfortably (its authors are Russian and it has been internationalized from day one), and I've even seen some pages displayed in Chinese. So theoretically it can display Khmer text too. (The program's main author confirmed this recently.)

Of course, for proper rendering FBReader needs to know something about wordbreaks in the text, and in order to display things gracefully, it needs access to an open-source line-breaking algorithm.

If there is such a creature -- I noted the PAN software but that's commercial, right? -- the best part of this is that the FBReader developers will incorporate it into the program as they did one for Chinese.

FBReader is a world-class e-reader; in my opinion the best one available, although it is restricted to Linux systems currently.[2] Books are not web-pages; you want an e-reader to read them in, not a browser. Conveniently, FBReader will read straight text or html directly, as well as a number of e-book formats.

Thanks for any help you can give me on this matter. I hope your conception of "better books" includes e-books too. :-)

Roger

[1] http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/

[2] FBReader is written in C and is open-source. Porting it to Windows is not something the developers have in mind, being 100 percent Linux guys, but is possible for any serious developer. Hopefully this e-reader will be available for Windows computers soon.