This HowTo shows you how to read "Full view" Google books offline. Google has taken on the task of digitizing (scanning) all of the world's books and making them available at their http://books.google.com website. The AA1 is great for reading these books via a web browser (my preference is Firefox), and even better for reading them offline when you don't have an available internet connection, or want to disable wireless to save your battery. The screen format lends itself to viewing a page, and the weight of the AA1 is comparable to a hard cover book. A subset of the books Google makes available are known as "Full view", meaning you can read the entire book through the website, or even download a PDF of the book for offline reading. The latter is what we're going to work on. The XP version of the AA1 comes with Adobe Acrobat reader, version 9. This can be used to read any of the books you download as a PDF file, in a natural way. Start by bringing up your favorite web browser and open up the Google Books page: http://books.google.com. Type the name of a book you're looking for (or an author's name) in the search box, and click "Search Books". I'm searching for the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. Once the search is complete, make sure it's a book you're able to download (A Princess of Mars is, because the copyright has expired). To do this, drop down the "Showing" box, and select "Full view only". That will refresh the page with a list of books that are available for download. This takes us to all of the matches for A Princess of Mars -- click on the title to go to the book view page: Click "Download PDF", "Save File", and "OK" to get the browser to ask you where you want to save it: I save my eBooks in "My Documents->My eBooks" -- save yours wherever you'd like. Now, either open Windows Explorer and navigate to "My Documents->My eBooks" and double click the PDF file you just saved, or open Acrobat Reader and find your book through the File->Open menu entry. You're almost ready to read offline! Once the book is up and displayed in Acrobat, click on the icon to "Show One Page At A Time". Now, go to View->Rotate View->Counterclockwise. If you noticed the entry two lines down from Rotate View on the menu, you probably know what to do next -- type a <ctrl>L -- that will switch Acrobat to full screen mode. Your e-book should now be taking up the entire screen in landscape mode, and be ready for reading. Use the Up Arrow key to go to the previous page, and the Down Arrow key for the next page. I find this just about as comfortable as holding a hard cover book. To return Acrobat to "normal" mode, type another <ctrl>L. Thanks to PhyrePhox, you can make Acrobat Reader remember where you were when you "closed" your book. Just go to Edit->Preferences->Documents, and check the box that says "Restore last view settings when reopening documents". Next time you open your book, it'll be on the page you left it. RLW
Thank you for the great How-To! I remember reading somewhere else that there is a setting to make Acrobat remember page... Ah yes, from http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=6009&p=51849&hilit=acrobat+page#p51849: Hope this helps!
Brilliant! With a little tweaking you can also read Project Gutenberg books this way. See here: http://philosophia.typepad.com/bookworm/2008/12/diy-kindle.html
Nice little idea. Probably don't want to clutter this thread, but I would love to see a new topic with people posting links to their favorite online books on Google Books, Gutenberg, etc. My biggest problem with Google Books is finding something interesting that is available online for download.
When I edit my picture in photoshop CS3, I want to duplicate the current layer with a shortcut ctrl+alt+arrows(can be up, down,left or right), but it wont duplicate the layer in my aspire one, it rotate the screen, depends on which arrow combined with ctrl+alt. I'm sorry if this thing is already posted somewhere here, but I think this can help to read the book
Intel video drivers that I have used on other computers have a "hotkey" setting in their preferences that can be turned off to prevent the screen rotation. Check your control panel for "Intel something something" and look for "Hotkey" or "rotation".
I've set that preference ("Restore last view settings when reopening documents"), but my books still reopen on the first page. Has anyone had any luck with this? RLW
Just one clarification : not all "full view" books are available for download. Many of them are fully available for viewing online, but do not have a downloadable PDF - it seems that if you see a picture of the cover in the search results, it is downloadable, if you see a blank with just the publisher's name, it is only available online. Fritz
Screen can be rotated with "hot keys" - details below I've had my AA1 for a couple of weeks now and downloaded some reading material (e-books). Rather than view them in landscape I decided to investigate rotating the screen to show the window in portrait mode. Instead of installing a special app e.g. irotate - http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/irotate.shtm It turns out that the intel display driver already installed in my AA1 has this feature readily available via hotkeys. To access, right click the mouse on the desktop, this will display Graphics Properties..... and Graphics Options Under Graphics Options>Display Settings check off "Enable Rotation". Under Graphics Options>Hot keys check off "Enable Hot Keys". Now Ctl+Alt+ the up/down/left/right keys rotate the screen as desired. Also selecting Graphic Options after right clicking the mouse displays screen rotation.
You should know that you can "download" copyright books, online only books, or whatever is on googlebooks. E.G Access 2007 Bible is copyrighted material for online viewing only, it's easily downloable with adobe acrobat directly through an adobe addon through the Internet Explorer. It's basically 2 click process. Also, there's no need to rotate your screen to view your books sideways. 1) There's the scheme settings in the intel driver: When you start your favorite ebook program, you can automatically rotate the screen. when you close the program, intel driver will automatically rotate the screen back. 2) There's a built in function in adobe acrobat where you can view the document sideways Also here's some tips: 1) Auto scroll hotkey in adobe acrobat: Ctrl+Alt+H up and down key to control direction of movement and speed 2) Full screen shortcut in adobe acrobat: Ctrl+ L Ctrl+ + and Ctrl + - controls the zoom level 3) create bookmarks so you won't have to scroll through the document for the pages where you left off from 4) Use the autoread function and adobe acrobat will read the document/book to you. I recommend ATT natural voice instead of the default MS sam. I also recommend removing the battery (especially 6 cell ones) and connect your AAO to AC. That way, you can hold the netbook like a book. Removing the battery shaves off a pound off the laptop. AAo without battery is about as heavy as a regular paperback novel. I also recommend installing a fan controller to "turn off" the fan. I personally use AA1fancontrol 1.6 program. The settings i use are: Fan on temperature 70C, fan off temperature 60C Reading ebook doesn't take a lot of processing power, CPU generally idles below 1%. Through my experience, reading ebook, the cpu temperature is below 45C when the cpu fan is turned off. The bottom of the netbook is cool to the touch. I'm able to get approximately 7.5 hours of runtime when reading ebook, wifi on, outlook 2007 on, foobar2000 playing music, msn , etc on a 6 cell 5200mah battery. I could probably squeeze another 10-30 minutes of battery life if i turned the screen bightness to low and put the ebook file on an SD card instead of the hard drive.
