“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” I feel that this old saying has lost it's meaning. It would be more appropriate to say that "A computer without eBooks is like a smartphone without an OS", in modern terms. The way we read books is undergoing a massive transformation. Gone are the days when books were mostly read as purchased paperbacks, or borrowed from libraries and friends with great enthusiasm. Nowadays, we find it more convenient just to either purchase or download eBooks (depending on whether or not you support piracy) and read them on computers, tablets or even smartphones. Some people are lucky enough to have dedicated eBook reading devices, others have to make do with reading on ebook reader software for computers.
I too am a great fan of reading eBooks. Till a few years back, I used to read eBooks on my computer, usually in Notepad or Wordpad. But the high contrast display settings were very trying on the eyes, and I found that I was not able to read continuously for long periods of time. There had to be a solution. Being somewhat of an amateur Visual Basic .NET programmer, I decided to create an application that would allow the user to easily change the font, background color and text color of the eBook. If the user keeps changing the colors once in a while, I found that it makes reading much easier. This is how smartBOOK was created, in December 2009. I used this for a couple of years, with great comfort. Then I got a dedicated eBook reader, and I now read in that. During my summer holidays of 2013, I decided to improve on the program, and release it to the public to help other readers. So I now present, smartBOOK 2.0!
And by the way, I am not running Mac OS, it is just one of smartBOOK's built-in themes. More on that later. smartBOOK is a unique eBook reader software for windows that combines the features that many of us have always wanted in Notepad and Word in one great, small, and fast application. Now I will list smartBOOK's features one by one and explain them.
Multiple File Formats
smartBOOK doesn't just support notepad files! You can also open Word Documents, Wordpad documents and HTML files. In the future, support for PDF documents will be added.Amazing Autoscroll
The above video demonstrates smartBOOK's autoscroll.
Whenever we read in Notepad or Word, we need to repeatedly scroll down or press the down arrow key. smartBOOK eliminates the need for this with the help of an amazing autoscroll that provides a hands-free reading experience. All you have to do is enable autoscroll from the menu. If you wish, you may change the default settings. smartBOOK's autoscroll will scroll slightly, stop, scroll slightly, and so on. This will ensure that no compromises in reading comfort are made by reading and scrolling at the same time.
The video above demonstrates smartBOOK's autoscroll.
Bookmark
While reading in conventional text editors, if you want to get back to the point where you were reading last, and to continue reading, you need to either scroll down large amounts, or else remember some text exactly from you last reading location and use the find function to get there. smartBOOK provides a one-click solution to this problem. Whenever you want to stop reading, all you have to do is 'insert' a bookmark there by clicking a menu button. When you want to continue, you can go to the previous location again at the click of a button!
Application Skins
Ever get tired of the same, boring look of Windows applications? That will never happen with smartBOOK, because you get 28 awesome app skins that can change the look of your application to suit your tastes, as well as the background color of your text.
Built-In eBook Themes
Since the main purpose of developing this application was to allow the colors to be changed, special attention has been paid to this. 10 built-in eBook 'Themes' have been provided, that have pre-configured values for font, background color and text color. In addition to this, users can also change these parameters manually.
Text To Speech
If you're feeling particularly lazy, you can have your eBook read out to you by Microsoft's text-to-speech engine. See a preview in the features video at the end of this article. This feature works best in Windows 8. A highly user-friendly interface has been provided to allow user to control the narration.
Dictionary
Have you come across a difficult word while reading? Don't go through the trouble of opening a browser and Googling it. smartBOOK features a querying module which retrieves definitions from Merriam-Webster's online database. Just select the word you want the meaning for, and click define. That's it, you're done! A window appears, like the one above and shows definitions of the word. Please note that this feature is experimental.
An Overview Of Features
Here is a video I made showing all the features of smartBOOK.
Having seen all the amazing features smartBOOK has to offer, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and download it!
smartBOOK is available in three different editions. You can either download only the installer, or the installer along with some eBooks. The source code is also available. It has been written in Visual Basic .NET 2008, and may need conversion to work with any other version. Read the Developer's Notes file before trying to build the code.
Choose the package you want from the links given below:
- Download Installer
- Download Source Code
- Download .NET Framework 3.5 (Required for XP and below, if not installed already)
I hope you enjoy using smartBOOK, much as I enjoyed creating it. If you have any feedback, criticism, suggestions or bug reports, send an e-mail to jayanth.rajakumar@gmail.com.
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