Turn your Android phone into an ebook reader

Hello again guys. I really like reading books. But while away for a few days, or even hours, I usually like to carry some books with me so that I can best utilise the time. But it's generally difficult to carry all your hard books with you, right? So, I am a big fan of the concept and usage of ebooks. :)

There are many ebook reader devices available in the market today. But it's not nice to spend a couple of bucks behind such a single-purpose device. So, I have decided to turn my smartphone into an ebook reader.

Nothing is hard when you have the cute little robo with you; your android. I am the owner of a mid-range android phone, LG Optimus pro. While the screen size is not very great, I really enjoy the QWERTY. Now, first of all, there are many ebook softwares for your android device from Google Playstore. Amazon Kindle, Nook, Sony reader, Mobi reader etc. are decent in features. But if you really want to take my advice, stay away from such big guys of the techworld and instead install Aldiko.

Aldiko is a small, fast, feature-rich and concise solution to all your ebook reading questions. The main features which make it a great app are:

• It is small, unlike Kindle which can be messy, with its 10+ MB size.
• It supports multiple online book stores, as well as free ebook download stores such as Smashwords.
• It allows you to view your book in potrait/landscape format.
• It supports two basic viewing modes, day and night. You can customize each mode as per your choice.
• It allows you to customize margins, font sizes and pretty much everything related to your books.
• It supports easy integration with volume keys of your android device to turn the pages. Otherwise, you can always tap the bottom of screen to go to the next page.

The screenshot to the left is a book in Day mode, while the above is Night mode. Now, I hope you have installed Aldiko without pain. So, now comes the customization part. First and foremost of all, remember that Landscape mode is way better than Portrait mode (some may differ in this regard). So, let us enable it. Get some free books from the store (most of these are classical literature stuff, but don't worry, I come to that later) and open one to view it on your phone. Now, go to Settings menu (tap anywhere on the screen and choose 'Settings') and select 'Orientation'. Now choose Landscape. Ignore this step if you like the default Portrait mode. 

Next, tell Aldiko to automatically adjust brightness for your eyes, rather than just use a maximum value that eats your battery power. Go to Settings and select Brightness and check 'Automatically adjust'. 

Now, you have probably seen that your phone screen is not that big such as that of a tablet or ebook-reader. This may be a problem, but with a slight tweek, we can partly solve this issue. You need to reduce the font size of your reader, such that more lines are allowed in a single page. Additionally, decrease the Margins to allow more space. For this, go to Settings and select Text. Now, reduce the values of Margin and Font using the button bellow them, to the level that you can still read the text with ease but more text is allowed. I suggest setting Margin to zero. Reduce the font size as per your will.

Now comes the collections part. While some might find it nice to just stick to the default stores, spending money for ebooks is not the spirit of an OS blessed with the winds of freedom. Time to turn your laptop/desktop on. I strongly discourage using torrents to illegally download books from internet. There are many good and free sites which allow you to download free ebooks. Remember that while Aldiko supports PDFs, best experience is received using epubs for your books. Here are some excellent sites from where you can download free Epubs for your device:

• Project Gutenberg, one of the largest free libraries online. They allow you to download all their books in multiple formats. I suggest downloading the Epub (No images) format, as it's small and fast to load. http://www.gutenberg.org/ Browse books through http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Category:Bookshelf
• Epubbooks, a nice and fast site. http://www.epubbooks.com/
• Epubbud http://www.epubbud.com/browse.php

Now, there are many other sites from where you can download PDF books. You can turn PDFs downloaded from there or from your collection into epubs with ease. If you are willing to do that online, here's your thing: http://ebook.online-convert.com/convert-to-epub

It uploads your pdfs and converts them into epubs. Alternatively, you can use a desktop converter. I suggest using Calibre. You can install it for Windows, Mac, Linux anything you like. If you use windows, just download it from here: http://calibre-ebook.com/download

If you use linux, calibre is right inside your repository. For Ubuntu and related distro users, just open a terminal and type: sudo apt-get install calibre 

and you are done.

Using Calibre, you can convert books from virtually any format to anything else. Now, once you have made yourself a large collection of downloaded or converted epubs, time to enter them into your android phone. Connect your phone to your computer and turn USB storage on. Now, copy and paste your epubs into your Ebooks folder of phone. Wait for copying to finish and then disconnect the phone. Now once SD card is read, open Aldiko and select 'Files' from its main menu. Select Ebooks folder from the list and click 'Import'. Your collection is just ready. :)