Creating E-Products for Palm and PocketPC Handhelds

Information in the palm of your hand. Sounds good, doesn’t it? A lot of people think so.

There are currently an estimated 30 to 40 million handheld information devices in use in the US, ranging from the well-known Palm series of handhelds to the Pocket PC and the BlackBerry.

More than 50% of handhelds run on the Palm operating system (OS), while another 35% use the PocketPC OS. The Palm file format for book-like documents is called .PDB and stands for Palm Database. PocketPCs can also read .PDB files. This means .PDB files should be readable for the vast majority of handheld users.

What Can You Create for Handhelds?
E-books are the most common document created as .PDBs but you can also deliver reports, booklets, newsletters, articles and any other text documents in this way.

Handheld users tend to be affluent male business professionals, 25 to 50 years of age, who are comfortable with technology. If you have text-based information products that cater to this market, consider which of your products they might like to carry with them for speed and convenience.

As an e-product creator, you have a couple of options for creating .PDB files out of your content. The first is a software program called Palm eBook Studio, which sells for $29.95. The second is a free application called Palm DropBook.

Palm eBook Studio
Palm eBook Studio has the advantage of being far easier to use than DropBook. You can copy and paste MS Word documents or import RTF (Rich Text Format), plain text and HTML files into the application. Using a fairly straightforward WYSIWYG editor, you can then format the text with bold, italics, different font sizes and so on.

You can create chapters to make navigating your e-document easier for readers, and develop a table of contents. You can even add images and create hyperlinks within the document. If you are familiar with basic word processing software, there shouldn’t be much of a learning curve to working with eBook Studio.

Once you’ve finished formatting your document in eBook Studio, the program gives you the option of password protecting it. With password protection, anyone who downloads the file and tries to read it on their handheld needs to first enter a password before the file opens. It adds an extra level of protection to your intellectual capital.

Palm DropBook
The Palm DropBook application is better suited to people with a programming bent. With DropBook, you take a plain text file and code it manually using PML (Palm Markup Language). The codes in PML are not unlike HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which is used for coding web sites. You then drag your PML file onto the DropBook icon and it converts it to a .PDB file.

A Tip About Reading the Files
To open a .PDB file, a handheld needs to have eReader installed. eReader is a free downloadable application. If you sell or give away .PDB products, be sure to include a link on your site to the free reader.

In a future article, I’ll take a look at Mobipocket, a reader and file format convention that works on multiple handheld platforms including smart phones.

Resources

eBook Studio
http://www.ereader.com/products/ebookstudio

Palm DropBook
http://www.ereader.com/dropbook/download

Guide to Palm Markup Language
http://www.ereader.com/dropbook/pml

Free Palm eReader
http://www.ereader.com/product/detail/15002