(Photo remixed from nDevilTV and austinevan.)
Dedicated e-book readers do have certain things going for them; they're very light weight, have long-lasting batteries, and they're digital, e-ink screens are easy-on-the-eyes. A big negative mark against them—in the minds of most geeks at least—is how dreadfully locked down they are. You can't tweak them, modify them, or use them as you see fit. Netbooks, by default of being an unrestricted personal computer capable of running any applications or reading any formats you care to throw at them, suffer from no such shortcoming. The following guide will help you turn your netbook into a comfortable e-book reader that—while it may not be as ultra lightweight and battery-friendly as a Kindle—will be infinitely more flexible.
Physical Tweaks and Tricks
Rotate The Screen: The tiny widescreen format of the netbook is, in the traditional orientation, terrible for reading e-books. It's squatty and doesn't do a very good job displaying large amounts of text at one time. Holding the netbook sideways in your hands like a book is the ideal way to maximize the screen real estate and read it comfortably.
Depending on your graphics chip and drivers, you may be able to rotate the screen orientation without any additional software by simply pressing CTRL+ALT+Left Arrow or CTRL+ALT+Right Arrow. While it's great to have a built in solution without installing any additional software, it's a less than idea solution. The build in screen-rotation trick works great for desktop computers where you might be rotating a widescreen monitor into a portration position, but it's not so handy on a netbook or laptop where the orientation of the keyboard and trackpad changes with the orientation of the physical screen.
Fortunately a lightweight solution exists. EeeRotate is a tiny application that combines the rotation of your screen and the rotation of the touchpad at the same time using a single shortcut. Once EeeRotate is installed pressing CTRL+ALT+Right Arrow rotates the screen and touchpad 270 degrees and CTRL+ALT+Up Arrow returns it to normal.
EeeRotate is a must have application for setting up your netbook as an e-book reader and we'd advise downloading it before proceeding.
Adjust The Screen Brightness: You should decrease the screen brightness to the lowest setting you can comfortably read it at. Not only will you extend your battery life but you'll be decrease the strain on your eyes. One of the strong selling points of stand-alone e-book readers is that their digital ink screens aren't back lit and can be read under the same conditions that you would read a regular book.
If your netbook has the ability to turn off the back light altogether you can try it out. Your experience with no back light can vary wildly though. With my Asus netbook I can read it comfortably in direct sunlight just like I would read a Kindle but anything less than full and direct sunshine makes the back-light-off setting completely useless.
Use a Special Power Saving Mode: Reading a document for an extended period of time on your netbook requires little to not effort on behalf of the computer. You can maximize your netbooks battery life as an e-book reader by setting up a special power saving mode just for the times you're using it as an e-book reader. Just switching it to the maximum power-saving mode won't cut it, putting your netbook in maximum power save usually has featured not condusive to reading like shutting the screen off after short periods of inactivity.
Your netbook may have an advanced power manager installed, but to quickly tweak the power settings in Windows you'll want to open up the Power Options menu. Right click on the battery icon in your system tray or look under Settings -> Power Management. You'll want to tweak your power settings so that the monitor never turns off, the hard disks spin down after 5 minutes—once you load an e-book to read it's in the memory of the computer and you won't likely need to do any heavy hard disk accessing—and set the system to never go into standby mode. With the brightness turned down and the hard disk kept quiet, you should be able to squeeze out quite a bit of reading time.
Setting Up E-Book Software
What e-book software you end up using is entirely a matter of personal preference, and the dealbreaker might be as tiny as what key is closest to your thumb when holding the netbook in a comfortable position and what that key does—turns the page, pages down, etc—in a particular e-book application. With that in mind, we'd urge you give each of the following free applications a test drive to see which one is the most comfortable option for your netbook, how you hold it, and your reading style.
Kindle for PC (Windows, Free):
Calibre (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free):
Mobipocket Reader Desktop (Windows, Free):
You can, of course, use just about any software you want as long as it can run on your OS and works when the orientation of the screen is rotated—good luck with Adobe Reader! We couldn't get most e-books to display correctly once rotated—which is the beauty of using a netbook over a hardware and firmware-locked dedicated e-book reader.
The above tools will get you started with enjoying e-books on your netbook in a more pleasing orientation and format. If you have a favorite reader or tool for making e-book consumption on your netbook comfortable, we'd love to hear about it in the comments.
