About The Unpress

I'm Nick Vargish, and I got started on this because I loved the idea of being able to carry a few important documents around in my Palm Pilot (it was a Palm IIIx back then). At first, I concentrated on DOC and Peanut Reader formats. After a while, I decided that publishing in HTML and converting to various PalmOS formats made a lot of sense, since HTML had become a ubiquitous document format. All of these works have been derived from public domain sources, and "my" versions are also public domain wherever possible. If knowlege is power, and reading is knowlege, I like to think of this page as my small contribution to the empowerment of everyone. Please share, and enjoy.

eText Resources

Project Gutenberg

MemoWare

FictionWise

Palm Digital Media

Terms of Use

Since the texts you may download from this page have been placed in the public domain by their preparer - myself - I can't restrict your use of them at all! In fact, I encourage you to redistribute these works in any way you find convenient. (If more people read the Constitution, we might have fewer people shooting off their mouths about "rights"... But I digress.) Feel free to link to this page from yours. You may use the following button, if you are so inclined - you certainly don't have to use it. I only request that you let me know you're mentioning my page, and the URL of your page so I can get the ego-gratification of seeing my product there. Thanks!

Format Notes

DOC The oldest document format for the PalmOS, the venerable DOC format was pioneered by Aportis Inc, and must not be confused with files produced by a common desktop word processing program. There are now many programs ("readers") for this format available and many readers that handle custom formats also handle DOC files. A very popular free program to read DOC files is CSpotRun.

iSilo One of the first readers to handle HTML documents, iSilo preserves formatting and hyperlinks in a document. In addition to the reasonably priced full-featured version, there is a free version with reduced functionality available. iSilo can read DOC files as well as its own.

Plucker This is an excellent reader that's open source and handles HTML-formatted input. The development team is very active, and Plucker is being improved just about every week. Though it won't help with the books here at the Unpress, Plucker offers better color support than iSilo. You can also hide the scrollbar and toolbar, for maximum content on screen which is nice no matter what you're reading.

Peanut This is used by the folks at Palm Digital Media (nee Peanut Press) as the distribution format for their commercially published books. The reader is now called "PalmReader", since Palm bought Peanut Press in the first quarter of 2001. It's a nice reader with an elegant interface, but unfortunately the format doesn't support links within documents and there's no easy way to convert HTML documents into the proprietary Peanut markup language. PalmReader can also read DOC files.