Mobdex - Project Gutenberg on your cellphone
Russell Beattie launched mobdex last week. Mobdex allows you to browse and read several hundred books from project gutenberg on your cellphone. Russell took those public domain books and the site offers sufficiently easy navigation and breaks the books into small chunks for consumption on tiny screens and weak mini-browsers.
This idea is pure genius. I’ve always been a huge fan of ebooks and read several ebooks on my 7650 when i was still using it. Reading books on a cellphone really works a lot better than most people would suspect. After switching to a dumbphone i sorely missed ebooks, but thanks to mobdex i now have access to a vast library of classic masterpieces. I’ve thought about something like this for quite some time but never came around implementing it, but my original approach was kinda flawed anyway: i rather thought along the lines of a j2me ebook reader that can download books ota, but mobdex’ approach of a web library is so much better.
The site renders beautifully on my moto a835 and besides a few ui weaknesses i can’t recommend the site enough. Now if only there were something like this with current ebooks in its catalog.