Electronic Reader

An electronic reader is an outstanding way to take your Islam with you, in concept at least. As I mentioned last time Pocket Islam does have a Qur'an Reader included, but I found it always booted into Arabic and always reset to Al Fatiha. I can't remember where I left off.

On my Palm OS device so many years ago I found iSilo. A good enough reader, even good enough that I purchased a copy. They appear to have versions for Palm, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. The documents are easy enough to find, and when you can't you can use their program to convert HTML into an iSilo document. Using an HTML spider program you can even rip a copy of a Qur'an or Hadith collection and then convert that into iSilo.

Recently, however, I think I found better. Mobipocket supports Palm, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Windows, Symbian, and Blackberry. It also natively runs on the Iliad and Cybook readers and non-DRM Mobipocket docs can be read on the new Amazon.com Kindle. Mobipocket (which seems to be owned by Amazon.com) even has a creator program that converts a few different formats: PDF, Word, Text, HTML. You can then package covert art, create a table of contents, etc. I used this to convert a PDF of the meaning of the Qur'an in English as translated by Muhsin Khan.

The Qur'an looks good enough on my PDA phone, but it's still a small screen, and the backlight keeps turning off. I've ordered an eReader that uses eInk (the above mentioned Kindle) and I hope that it is large enough and easy enough to read that I can bring it to salat jumah and get some reading in before the khutbah begins. The Islamia website appears to have multiple documents available for download that should be easily converted for use in either iSilo or Mobipocket, though I can't vouch for their authenticity.