The Psion Revo has 8MB of internal RAM memory (and many other computers running the Revo's Symbian EPOC operating system have more). This is enough to store literally dozens of books in compressed format, and there are hundreds which have been made available for download over the Internet. It's logical, therefore, for some sort of reader to exist for these books on the Revo!

For the original Series 3, Barry Childress wrote a program called Reader, and Jean-Luc Damnet wrote the excellent VReader5 for the Series 5 and Series 5mx. I've tried this on the Revo, and it works - but has some problems on the Revo's smaller screen. However, Simon Quinn has now released EBook for EPOC in a Revo-friendly format.

EBook reads both plain text and Aportis DOC format (popular on 3Com Palm computers), although not the Psion TCR format used in Reader and VReader5. Note added 23/03/2000 - PalmTime have now added TCR format support. Thanks! This isn't a major problem, though, as the Palm has a larger user base, particularly in the USA - therefore, plenty of books are available in this format.

When you first open a file, you'll probably be surprised to find no scroll bar for moving around a file. This isn't really a problem, though, as the most convenient way to scroll around is to use the keyboard - a scroll bar would only be useful most of the time for showing your position in a document.

Three other navigation methods are available - the first, an interesting screen-tapping system. If you tap at the top or bottom of the screen, you move backwards and forwards by page, but if you tap in the middle you move by line - the direction is determined by the side of the screen the tap is closest to. You can also press the 'i' key to show the percentage of the document you are at (why 'i' and not 'p' for percentage or position?) and a certain percentage can be jumped to.

Bookmarking is also available, and is very handy - just go to the Add Bookmark option and hit Ctrl+B at any time to create multiple bookmarks you can jump to later. The first few words of the chosen line, as well as the time, date and file percentage, are stored. No naming function is available, but probably isn't necessary. Find options are available, as you would expect, as well.

To make reading easier, you can swap between the Revo's three built-in fonts and choose different sizes. Your only option for text formatting is bold, but unless you enjoy reading books at tiny font sizes that's unlikely to be a problem.

Extra display settings are available - in addition to the standard 'toolbar on, toolbar off' choice, you can flip the display to read vertically down (so you can hold your Revo like a book) rather than horizontally across. It's probably not a feature I'd use often, but an interesting one all the same.

I couldn't find any problems with EBook, but there are two extra features I'd like - to be able to copy text to the Clipboard, and an autocue-like function to automatically scroll the book down. These are available in VReader5, and I think they would make useful features in EBook too.

Provided you have time to read books on your Revo - and, of course, that you can find books you want to read! - EBook is a generally polished program and is the first application you should look at for Revo-enabled reading.