It wasn’t that long ago that we reviewed the excellent Mobipocket Reader (see our review posted on 12-12-2003) and we certainly had no plans to revisit the MobiPocket folks anytime soon, other than to check out their amazingly rich libraries of eBooks.

However, the new features in version 4.8 plus the eNews Creator tool leave us no choice.

I’m excited about these developments for more than one reason. And while we’re at it we’ll have a look at another two books from the Oxford stable.

First, the good news: this major upgrade is free if you already have MobiPocket Reader Pro 4.5 or a later version. For others it’s just $19.95.

You will notice a big change in the Mobipocket Web Companion PC software. As you know, this is AvantGo functionality, enabling you to download and sync news from the Internet to read off-line on your PDA or smartphone.

Being the news junkie that I am, I subscribe to many newspapers, magazines and ezines. I used to have AvantGo as my “gopher” to go and get all that stuff but I had some major trouble trying to get it all to work again after I upgraded my hardware (as I do frequently).

MobiPocket gives me a very easy access to many sources now whereas the choice before was not as broad as AvantGo’s.

• Sync eNews directly to the memory card of your PDA/smartphone :  

• Read RSS feeds and Weblogs with the Web Companion

• Subscribe to eNews directly from within the new Web Companion interface

• Personalize the periodicity of eNews updates

• Update eNews individually, get latest versions, auto-detect and repair broken eNews channels

• More than 500 eNews channels from major websites

• Full Support of Microsoft Smartphone 2002 & 2003 OS

• Improved Microsoft ActiveSync synchronization

Just tempering MobiPocket’s marketing enthusiasm a little bit here: the current number of subscriptions to choose from is “only” 363 – just a bit shy of the “more than 500” they claim. Hey, it’s a moot point: you can never read them all and there’s a magnificent choice of quality periodicals. It seems I read one major newspaper from every continent: our own Sydney Morning Herald is a great read plus I peruse FOX, BBC and NRC from Holland. Plus there’s a slew of technical journals and great PocketPC websites to choose from. All that for free…

Making your selection straight from the Web Companion is easy. I just wish that little window could be maximised to full screen!

Downloading the updates every day only takes a few minutes so that, later in the day, you can reclaim the countless minutes you spend just waiting for people or things.

Verdict:

 Great upgrade. If you haven’t tried MobiPocket Reader recently you owe it to yourself to try out the ease of switching to landscape, integrated access to dictionaries, extensive annotation and reviewing options and the myriad of other features as reviewed earlier.

In the next round of MobiPocket news we’ll put the eNews Creator to the test and we’ll see how easy it is to create an eNews Channel for this website. And, as usual, we’ll have a few more eBook titles to brief you on.

Let’s have a brief tour of two more Dictionaries from the respected Oxford line.

Well, there’s nothing concise about that title! Let’s abbreviate it to ODE and find out what etymology is all about.

Basically, it’s the study of the origin of words. When was a particular word first used? When did others come in vogue?

It’s a fascinating study because many languages are intertwined in their history. Take the prevalence of words derived from French in the English language. There must be a good reason for it and there is. It’s a pity that the French these days are so loath to accept English words in their mother tongue!

Not that the French language is so pure either: they have a rich history rooted in Latin.

And that’s where *probably* the word prevalence comes from. I say ‘probably’ because this is where the ODE inexplicably let me down. I wanted to look it up but there was no entry between “prevail” and “prevaricate”… And that from a source of over 17,000 entries! Mmmm…

I can, of course, ramble on about all the other entries that are fully covered but this is a serious omission. I don’t have the paper edition to compare it with but there were also a few other things missing.

Like: I would have expected an introduction of the science of etymology. The book launches straight into Search Mode without even explaining some of the abbreviations used! For instance, the use of Roman numerals, like XIV, to denote use of a word in the 14^th century, is not explained in a Preface.

There is a Lookup function for Abbreviations which has less than 30 entries. Among them are gems like “phone” or “hooch” (name of an Indian tribe from Alaska that made “Hoochinoo”, an illicit and poor liquor…

Even less endowed is the Lookup a Person section: Only two persons made the list…

Or I should say: two entries for the same person.

I wonder why bother having these segments at all!

Sorry, folks, this particular dictionary didn’t cut the mustard. For $20 I would have expected a better implementation of what can be a  valuable tool.

One other thing that becomes a problem when you have a title that runs for half a mile: it’s hard to tell which book you’re perusing. It only tells you: “The Concise O…” on the search page.

This tome is structured along the same lines as the previous work but, fortunately, the list of persons to look up runs in the hundreds as you would expect of a history work.

However, there are only 4700 entries deemed worthwhile to describe what went on in this sorry world of ours for the last 4000 years.

Zog the First made it on the list but Abraham didn’t. Putin hasn’t been in office long enough, I suppose, and neither has George W. although the elder Bush is represented as well as three chaps by the name Alexander !

The beauty of ebooks should also be that they can be updated more frequently than their paper cousins. More important though is that history has been condensed too much in this volume. And it is not even called a “concise” dictionary.

A nice feature are the country vignettes: reasonably detailed descriptions of most countries, including a very basic map.

The webpage states that it is up to date and that there are biographical entries from Moses to Tony Blair. Are we reading the same book here? Moses is definitely not on the list…

Verdict

Again, Oxford has a name to uphold. These two works at $20 each have great potential but these versions feel like they can do with substantial beefing up.

My conclusion: in the absence of any other works that cover these two areas there is not much choice. There’s still a lot of good material in both books but I would be doing you, the reader, a disservice if I didn’t point out the shortcomings either.

I hope and trust that my next couple of selections from Oxford will restore my confidence in the publishing house.

More info: www.mobipocket.com

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