Developer: Jim Chapman

Freda: the free ebook reader

Freda is a free program for reading electronic books (ebooks) on Windows Mobile devices. Features:

• Compatible with Windows Mobile versions 6, 5 and 2003
• Reads ePub (DRM-free), HTML and TXT format books
• Touch screen interface
• Works with all screen dimensions and orientations
• Customisable controls, fonts and colours
• Dictionary lookup
• Bookmarks and annotations

Installation Instructions:

Installation directly onto the device It is possible to install directly onto the device. Download the Mobile Install (CAB) file, and place it in any folder on the Windows Mobile device. Execute the CAB file (normally achieved by tapping on the file in an Explorer window), and it will install the program and all components in their default locations. You can now delete the CAB file from your device if you wish. The CAB installation will create (if it does not already exist) a folder \My Documents\Freda ebooks\, and place a copy of this document (Freda Manual.epub) in it. This folder is the default location for your library of ebooks (you can change it using the Settings - Folders screen). Un-installation Instructions: If you installed it using ActiveSync, you should use the ActiveSync application manager to uninstall the Freda application. Alternatively, you may remove the program from your device manually, by deleting the folder \Program Files\Freda and all its contents and subfolders.

Main Menu

The Freda main menu offers access to the actions listed below. To see details of each available action, click on the link. Alternatively, click here for instructions on how to begin using Freda. Note: at certain times, some menu actions will be unavailable ('greyed out') or absent. For example, 'Go' and 'Find' will be available only if a book is loaded. Shortcuts Open +-Most Recent Book +-Bookshelf +-Library Options +-Application Settings +-Book Properties +-Presets --+-Named Presets --+-Save +-Go --+-Go Back --+-Go to Page --+-Previous Chapter --+-Next Chapter --+-Go to Chapter --+-Table of Contents +-Find --+-in book --+-in dictionary +-Bookmark --+-Add --+-Find +-Screen --+-Window Mode/Full Screen Mode --+-Keep Backlight On/Allow Backlight to Turn Off --+-Rotation +-Close --+-Close Book --+-Close and Forget Book --+-Close Application

Starting using Freda

When started, Freda will display an initial 'splash' screen. To start using Freda, tap anywhere on the screen to open the Freda main menu. You can also open this menu using the 'enter' or 'action' key. Opening a book From the main menu, select the 'Open' option. Sub-items on this menu allow you to resume reading the last book, open your the bookshelf, or open the library. If you have previously had a book open, the Most Recent Book action will resume reading that book at the place you left off. The Library is the collection of all books currently in your library folder (by default, \My Documents\Freda ebooks\). The Library action allows you to view all the books in your library folder. Tap to select the book you wish to open, and then tap on the OK soft-key button at the bottom left of the screen. To filter the list so that it shows only those books whose names contain a certain word, type that word into the 'Find Names Containing' box, and tap the 'Refresh List' button. To look for books in a subfolder of your library folder, tap the 'Folder' button and then navigate to the folder you want to look in, and tap OK to return to the Library screen. You must then tap the 'Refresh List' button, to display all the books in the chosen subfolder. To see books from the currently selected folder and all its subfolders, select the 'Search Subfolders' option The available books are shown as a detail list, with one row per book, with filename, file type and subfolder (if applicable) shown in various columns. To sort by a particular column, tap on the column heading. The Bookshelf consists of the last twenty books you have opened. When you first run Freda, the Bookshelf will be empty, but once you have been reading some books, it provides a convenient way to return to a book you were reading earlier. To resume reading a book from the bookshelf, tap on it and then tap the 'OK' soft-key button at the bottom left of the screen Once you have selected a book, Freda will load and paginate it; during this process the program will show a grey screen with an animation. When the book is ready, Freda will display the first page (or in the case of a book that you have previously been reading, the last page you read). Reading a book To move to the next page of the book, you can do any of:

1. press the right or down buttons on your device's key-pad/D-pad (if present)
2. tap the right soft-key button on the screen, labelled '>>' (if visible; if you have put Freda into 'full-screen' mode, this control will not be visible - see Full Screen Mode)
3. flick the screen with your finger-tip, as if flicking the page upwards, towards the top of the screen
4. flick the screen with your finger-tip, as if turning the page to the left
5. tap near the bottom or the right of the screen

Note: depending on how Freda's controls have been set up, some of these options may not work. See 'Settings – Controls'. To move to the previous page of the book:

1. press the left or up buttons on your device's key-pad/D-pad (if present)
2. tap the left soft-key button on the screen, labelled '<<' (if visible; if you have put Freda into 'full-screen' mode, this control will not be visible - see Full Screen Mode)
3. flick the screen with your finger-tip, as if flicking the page downwards, towards the bottom of the screen
4. flick the screen with your finger-tip, as if turning the page to the right
5. tap near the top or the left of the screen

Note: depending on how Freda's controls have been set up, some of these options may not work. See 'Settings – Controls'. When moving to another page, Freda displays a 'scrolling' animation. If this is not desired, you can switch it off using the 'Settings – Appearance' screen. While reading, you may encounter a page that Freda has not yet loaded or paginated. In this case, you will see the grey screen with the loading/paginating animation, while Freda prepares the page for you. Adding books to your library Freda's library of books consists simply of all books in the folder '\My Documents\Freda ebooks' on the device (note: you can change this location using Settings - Folders). If you have a book file on your PC, you can add it to Freda's library by using ActiveSync to copy the file into that folder. Alternatively, if you have found a book on the internet, you can download it directly into that folder by using your device's web-browser. Chapters and the loading of books ePub books are broken into chapters, and Freda takes advantage of this when loading books, by quickly loading whichever chapter you need to see, and putting it on-screen just as soon as it is ready. The program will carry on with loading all the other chapters as a 'background' task. If you have enabled the on-screen display of page numbers (see Settings - Appearance), you can see this because, until the book is fully loaded, the page number will be unavailable and a 'Paginating' message will be displayed instead. In the case of very large books, Freda may be unable to hold all chapters in memory at the same time. In this case, Freda will stop loading chapters, and will load/unload chapters on demand, so that you can always read the current chapter, but some earlier or later chapters will not be held in memory. In this case, the page number will be unavailable, and some features (such as 'Find' and 'Go to Page' will be unavailable. Although TXT book files are not broken into separate chapters, Freda internally treats them as if they were, to give better flexibility around loading and paginating them. Broadly speaking, Freda splits the TXT file into chunks of 1,000 lines, and treats each chunk as a separate chapter. Closing Freda When you have finished using Freda, you can use the Close item on the main menu. The Close Book action will unload the book from memory, but leave Freda running, and ready to read another book. Close and Forget Book closes the book, and in addition removes that book from your bookshelf (i.e. the list of recently used books). To force the program to exit, use the Close Application menu item. In normal use, there is no particular need to use this item (because you can switch from Freda to another application by using the [x] control at the top right of the screen. This action may be convenient, however, if you are running Freda in 'full screen' mode (in which case the [x] control will not be visible).

Working with Books

Go The Freda main menu (accessed by tapping on the screen) includes an item 'Go', which can be used to navigate to other parts of the currently open book. The items on the menu are as follows: Go Back returns to the place you were before your last 'Go' operation. Go To Page brings up a screen with a slider control that you can use to select the page number to move to, and a list of all available chapter names/numbers. Go to Chapter: allows you to jump directly to the start of any chapter in the book. A 'chapter' in this sense is just defined as 'one of the sub-files within the ePub book'. More useful is the Table of Contents action, which lets you select one of the locations defined in the ePub book's table of contents. If the table of contents is missing or malformed (a distressingly common occurrence) this option will be absent, or just won't do anything. Options to move to the Previous chapter and Next chapter are also available on this menu. These will move to the previous/next chapter within the book, if this chapter exists. Some of these options may be inaccessible ('greyed out') at any given time. For instance: 'Go Back' is unavailable if no 'Go...' operations have yet been performed, and the 'Go To Page' slider for page selection will not be available until all chapters of the book have been paginated (because until this has been done, we do not know what the pages' numbers are). Find The Freda main menu includes a Find action, to allow you to search for occurrences of a word in the book, or to look up a word in the dictionary. If the option is 'greyed out' it means that the book is not yet fully loaded. To look up a word in the dictionary, tap on the word and select the Find > in dictionary action. If this option is unavailable, it may be that the dictionary software is not installed. Freda works with the SlovoEd dictionary package, which can be downloaded from here. If you accessed the main menu by tapping on a word, the Find > in book action will search for the next occurrence of that word. If you tapped on a blank area of screen to bring up the menu, the Find action will present a screen for you to enter the text you wish to search for, and an option to set the search direction (forward or backward). If Freda finds the search text, it will switch to the page containing it, highlighting the first word containing the search text (to search again, tap on that word and pick the 'find' option). If Freda reaches the end of the book without finding the search text, it will display a message box to this effect; tap on the message box's 'OK' button to clear the message off the screen. When a word is found, it will be highlighted on the screen. To find the next occurrence of the highlighted word, tap on it and select the Find '...' > in book action. Links/Hrefs Words within ePub and HTML books may be links ('hrefs') to another point within the book. Such words are, by default, displayed in blue. Tapping on a link word will 'go to' the link target. To return from following a link, use the 'Go > Go Back' menu option. Bookmarks To create a new bookmark, tap on a word to bring up the main menu, then select the Bookmark > Add action. A data-entry screen is then displayed, for you to enter any annotation text that you wish. The 'fetch book text' button will populate the 'notes' text with the text of the paragraph containing the bookmark. When you tap OK to return to the main screen, you will see that the bookmarked word is indicated by a light underlining. To see (and edit) the annotation on a previously-bookmarked word, tap on the underlined word, and Freda will display a window showing the annotation text, and ask whether you want to edit it. To see the list of all bookmarks and annotations in the currently open book, select Bookmark > Find. A list of bookmarks will be shown: You can select a bookmark from the list by tapping on it, or by entering a search string into the text box and tapping the 'Find' button. To edit the selected bookmark, tap 'Edit'; to delete it, tap 'Delete'. Screen The main Freda menu contains items to change the appearance and behaviour of the device screen. Window/Full Screen Mode This item switches between 'Windowed' mode and 'Full Screen' mode. In 'Windowed' mode, the application title bar appears across the top of the screen and the soft-key buttons along the bottom. In 'Full Screen' mode, these elements are removed, and the whole of the screen is available for displaying book text. When you switch modes, you will see the 'Paginating' animation for a few seconds, while Freda repaginates the text to account for the change in the amount of screen space available for displaying text. Keep Backlight On/Allow Backlight to Turn Off allows you to force the backlight to remain on, ignoring any device setting that normally turns the backlight off after a certain period of time. Take care: using this option can run your battery down quickly. The Rotation option tells Freda to display pages rotated (for example, in landscape mode rather than portrait). To force the display of text in one of these orientations, select it from the submenu. If you want Freda to just use whichever orientation the device is currently using, then select Under system control from the submenu. Shortcuts To display a set of screen shortcuts, select the Shortcuts action from the main menu. This will bring up a screen of shortcuts to commonly-used actions: You can reprogram the screen-tap action so that you can bring up the 'Shortcuts' display by just tapping the page. See Settings-Controls Tap any of the icons to access the corresponding function. The 'Return' icon will dismiss the shortcuts screen without doing anything.

Options

The main menu includes an Options item with three sub-items:

1. Application Settings to adjust appearance, controls, folders and other settings which will be used regardless of which book is opened.
2. Book Properties to adjust code page and layout features which will be different for each book that you open.
3. Presets to let you save and restore application settings (for example, to let you quickly switch to a configuration that works best for night-time reading, or one-handed operation).

Application Settings: The Application Settings action on the main menu will display a multi-tabbed screen, with tabs containing various screens on which you can adjust font face, size and colour, folders, appearance and various advanced settings. Tap on the ‘tab’ labels along the bottom of the window to move between these screens. When done, you can save your settings and return to the main reader screen by tapping on the OK soft-key button at the bottom left of the screen. Or to abandon your changes, tap on the Cancel button on the bottom right. Upon returning to the main reader screen, you may see the 'Paginating' screen for a few seconds, if you have made a change that affects the size of displayed words (font size, for example). Settings - Fonts and Colours The first two 'Settings' tabs allow you to adjust font face, size and colour. The font tab displays all the fonts faces availble on your device, and a range of plausible font sizes. The colour tab provides three buttons, respectively allowing you to adjust the foreground text colour, the background (paper) colour and the link (href) colour. Clicking on these buttons will bring up the standard Windows Mobile 'Color Dialog', which allows you to select a new colour for the chosen element. Note the behaviour of this dialog: First: tap on the coloured square to select a colour Then: tap on the 'ok' label in the title bar of the 'Color Dialog'. You can also select a textured screen background on this screen. Settings - Folders This tab allows you to customise the folders used by Freda (useful if, for example, you wish to keep your files on a storage card). Two folder locations are customisable: Library Folder: controls where Freda will look for ebooks. Temp Working Folder: specifies where Freda will keep its temporary working files – for example, the html files that are produced by unzipping an ePub archive. Freda never purges these files (though you can do so manually, see Settings - Advanced) so you should pick a location where you know there is plenty of free storage space. Note that Freda does not create these folders for you, and it does not move any files. To change one of these folders, tap on the corresponding 'Change' button. A tree view will be displayed, which you can use to specify the chosen directory location. When you have selected the folder you want to use, return to the main Settings screen by tapping the OK soft-key button at the bottom left. Settings - Appearance On this tab you can enable or disable the 'scrolling' and 'paginating' animations. You can also change the way the page number is displayed at the bottom of the page: 'None' will display no page number, 'Number' will display a number, and 'Line' will display a fine horizontal line at the bottom of the screen, with a triangular pointer showing what proportion of the book has been read so far. You can also tell Freda to, on starting up, automatically open the last book you were reading, rather than starting on the 'Splash' screen. The next two options let you, respectively, change the width of the screen border (i.e. the number of pixels of blank space that Freda will leave around the edge of the screen) and the line-spacing. The last option allows you to control whether or not Freda will display the book title in the 'title' bar of the window. Settings - Controls This tab lets you customise the way that Freda responds to various control gestures. The available gestures are:

1. Tap at edge: a brief finger tap near to the edge (top, bottom, left or right) of the screen.
2. Tap middle: a brief finger tap anywhere other than the edge of the screen.
3. Long tap: keeping the finger pressed on the screen without moving it for around half a second (Note: actually, the handling of this gesture is not customisable; it always opens Freda's main menu).
4. Soft Keys: a tap on one of the '<<' or '>>' softkeys at the bottom of the screen.

For each gesture, available behaviours will be some or all of:

1. Change page: move to the next or previous page of the book.
2. Show menu: display Freda's main menu.
3. Display shortcuts: display Freda's shortcuts screen.
4. Ignore: do nothing.

You can enable or disable the use of the swipe/flick gesture to change page, and tell Freda whether to use an up/down gesture or a left/right one. This screen also includes options to specify what portion of the screen will constitute the 'edge' for the purposes of the 'tap at edge' gesture. You can also specify a special treatment for a tap gesture at the middle bottom of the screen (the space occupied by the page number); if this option is enabled, then a tap on that part of the screen will bring up the Go to page screen. Settings - Advanced Options on this tab allow you to: Clear Temporary Files: delete everything in Freda’s temporary folder (where it keeps its working files). Take care – Freda just deletes every folder in the directory; it does not make any effort to work out whether any particular file belongs to it. As long as you stick with the default setting (\Program Files\Freda\Temp) this will not be a problem Clear Bookshelf: forget all information about what books have previously been loaded (i.e. thumbnail images, last-opened page, etc.). This function does not delete any ebook files. The 'Clear' options will be applied when you tap the 'OK' button - i.e. to clear the Bookshelf, tap (to 'tick') the option, then tap the 'OK' soft-key at the bottom left of the screen. Book Properties: The Book Properties action on the main menu will display a screen allowing you to customise the rendering of the currently loaded book. When done, you can save your settings and return to the main reader screen by tapping on the OK soft-key button at the bottom left of the screen. Or to abandon your changes, tap on the Cancel button on the bottom right. The properties will be saved alongside the book details in Freda's 'Bookshelf', and will be used every time this particular book is opened in the future. If you want to use a particular set of properties for every new book you open in the future, you can achieve this by ticking the 'Set as default for new books' item. Options on this screen allow you to adjust the code page used for decoding the file, increase or decrease the margin used, force the indenting of the first line of every paragraph, force the use of justified- or left-alignment and force the insertion of a line break after every paragraph. Note the following points: For EPUB and HTML books, the code page will normally be specified within the book file itself. For TXT files, the code page is not specified within the file, and by default Freda will just use the device's default code page. If this gives bad results (such as some characters - particularly accented characters and quote-marks - appearing as funny-looking symbols), you can use this screen to tell Freda to use a different code page, and see if this produces better results. For EPUB and HTML books, margins (i.e. gaps above, below, left of and right of various elements) may be set using CSS style-sheets. Freda attempts to interpret these margins in a way that makes sense for display on a handheld device (for instance, a left margin of 1.5 inches would be sensible for a book printed on A4 paper, but would be daft on a screen that is only 3 inches wide). Freda approximates the correct margin width by looking at all the CSS margin settings in force for a given element, and setting a margin amount equal to 0%, 10%, 20% or 30% of the screen width. If, for a particular book, this gives more margin than you like, you can scale it down by setting the maximum permissible margin to 20%, 10% or 0% (which means no margin will be applied to anything, regardless of what the style sheet may say). For TXT books, there is no way to specify margin, and this option has no effect. Upon returning to the main reader screen, you may see the 'Paginating' screen for a few seconds. Presets: The Presets action from the main menu provides a sub-menu consisting of a list of 'presets' which you can load. A preset is simply a named collection of application settings. To replace the current application settings with one of the presets, select it from this menu. Upon returning to the main reader screen, you may see the 'Paginating' screen for a few seconds. You can save as many additional many presets as you like. To save a preset, select the 'Save'option on the menu, and then either type in the name of a new preset, or select an existing one. The current application settings will then be saved under the specified preset name.

Troubleshooting and Advanced Topics

Cover Images In the Bookshelf view, Freda shows a cover image thumbnail for each book. For EPUB books, this is extracted from the EPUB archive in accordance with the IDPF/OPS standard (the cover image file is the target of the href attribute of an item within the manifest whose id is equal to the cover-id specified as the value of the content attribute of the meta element (within the meta-data section) whose name is "cover"). If this algorithm doesn't find a cover image, Freda will make a guess, and probably not use the image you wanted. In this case, you should download Calibre and use it to set the correct cover image for your EPUB file. For TXT and HTML books, Freda will look for a .jpg file in the same folder as your book, with the same name as the book, and use this for the cover image (for instance, if the book is called "Turnips.txt", Freda will look for a cover image file called "Turnips.jpg"). Style-sheets and images for HTML books Freda can read HTML files which include images and use CSS style-sheets. For Freda to pick these images and style-sheets up, they need to be in the same folder as the HTML file concerned. Command Line Arguments If a command line argument is specified, Freda will assume it is the name of a book file and will open it on starting. For best results, you should specify the full path name (starting at root) for the book file. This behaviour can be useful if you want to create a short-cut that opens a particular book, or if you want to launch Freda programmatically from another application. Viewing images in books To open an image using your phone's default image-viewer application, tap and hold on the image and select the View Image action from the main menu. The image will open in that application, allowing you to pan/zoom/edit/save the image, as you wish. When you close the image-viewer, Freda will resume. Annotations If you want to 'export' all the annotations that you have made on a book, you can find them in the 'bookmarks' file for that book. This file will be located in the 'settings' folder under the Freda program folder, in a file whose name is the book name and whose extension is FBM. For example, for the book called "A Turnip of My Own.epub", you might find its annotations in "\Program Files\Freda\settings\A Turnip of My Own.fbm". Alternatively, if you are just wanting to 'export' the text of a single annotation, you can do this by tapping on the bookmarked word, tapping 'Yes' to edit the bookmark details, then 'Save' to leave the bookmark dialog. At this point, Freda will put the annotation text into the Windows 'clipboard'. So if you now switch to another application, the annotation text will be available to paste. Custom Backgrounds Freda comes with a set of texture files that you can select (on the Settings-Colours screen) for use as background to the text. You can customise this list by adding new texture bitmaps to the folder 'textures' under the Freda program folder. The file must be a bitmap (i.e. file extension BMP). Margin and Layout Problems Freda tries to interpret the margin and indent directives in a book in a reasonable way, but for some books you may have issues such as:

• Too much blank space above or below paragraphs, headings and other elements
• Too much blank space to the left or right of the text (which may result in text elements being squeezed into a narrow column down the middle of the page)

To resolve these problems for a particular book, use the Book Properties screen to change the 'Max Margin' value. By default, this is 30%; you should experiment with lower (or zero) values, and see which value gives the best appearance. Funny Characters appearing in the text (TXT books) A TXT file contains a stream of bytes. Any program that wants to turn those bytes into text has to make some assumption about how the author of those bytes expected them to be converted into text - because the file just contains the bytes, in doesn't include any hints about what the bytes actually mean. In technical terms, the program (e.g. Freda) needs to decide what Encoding the author used, when converting their text into bytes. To learn all about encodings, look the subject up on Wikipedia ('Unicode' is a reasonable place to start). If you don't want to make a lifetime's study of the subject, all you really need to know is: If your TXT book appears to include streams of weird characters, particularly in places where you expected to see quote-marks, dashes or accented characters, it's happening because Freda guessed what encoding was used by the file's author, and Freda guessed wrong. You can tell Freda what encoding it should be using for a particular book by using the Book Properties screen. Funny Characters appearing in the text (EPUB and HTML books) Unlike TXT files, EPUB and HTML files contain information to say how the file's bytes are intended to encode characters. If your EPUB or HTML document is displayed with streams of weird characters, particularly in places where you expected to see quote-marks, dashes or accented characters, it's happening because Freda was unable to understand the encoding information suppplied by the file. That could happen, for example, because the file was badly formatted (a lot of Gutenberg EPUBs have scrambled, unintelligible encoding info), or because the encoding is an unusual one. You can tell Freda what encoding it should be using for a particular book by using the Book Properties screen. Changing from 'Encoding per book file' to 'Device default' is quite likely to give a good result. Fonts Windows Mobile devices generally have a very limited set of fonts installed - but it is simple to add new fonts if desired. Generally, the best way to obtain additional fonts is to copy them from your desktop PC. Look in the folder C:\Windows\Fonts\ on the desktop PC to identify the font you would like to copy, and (using ActiveSync) copy that font into the folder \Windows\Fonts on your phone. Note: deleting fonts from the phone can be more complicated, as you may get a 'file locked' message when you try to delete the font file. In this case, just move the font file to another folder on the phone, and then soft-reset the phone. After the reset, you will be able to delete the file. Error Messages If Freda gives an error message when trying to open a book, you should check:

1. Is the free memory zero, or nearly so?
2. Is the storage card full?
3. Have you removed a storage card that Freda is expecting to use for books or temporary files?
4. Is the book file name valid?

You may learn something by looking at the last few lines in the 'logfile.txt' file (which will be in the Freda program folder).

Known Limitations (a.k.a. Development 'to do' list)

CSS Style Sheets Freda's handling of CSS style sheets is limited in two ways: 1) In-line styles are ignored. 2) Selectors cannot be concatenated (so Freda will not understand the syntax "div.foo p.bar {...}", intended to apply the properties {...} to any p.bar elements which have a div.foo ancestor). Concatenated selectors will be ignored. Freda does understand compound selectors like div.foo or p#bar. HTML Books HTML books are considered to consist of only a single file. If you have a set of HTML files that constitute separate volumes of a single work, Freda will be able to open them individually, but it will not understand references/links between them. If linkages between HTML files are important for you, you should build an ePub file out of your collection of HTML files. Multi-word Search The 'Find' function only searches for a single word at a time. Searching for a sequence of consecutive words is not yet supported. .Net Compact Framework In the ideal world, Freda's installer would figure out whether your device needed an updated version of the .Net Compact Framework, and if so it would install that updated version for you. Actually in the ideal world, the WindowsCE App Installer would take care of it all, and we poor application developers wouldn't have to worry about it. Anyhow, we are not in the ideal world, and a busy day of Googling has led me to conclude that there is no sure and easy way to accomplish it. I could build an installer that mostly did the right thing, but it could sometimes create really horrible snarl-ups, particularly on the more elderly WM5 devices and those with the less fashionable processor architectures. When I learned that, on some OEM builds, the .NetCF install may require a device reboot, I realised that this whole subject is not one that I wanted to wrestle with. Hrefs Link (Href) handling is limited – they will work within ePub books for any reference within a single book, and likewise within HTML files (provided that they do not contain absolute path names or URLs). Bitmaps Freda uses the standard .Net Compact Framework classes for managing bitmaps. These are not very memory-efficient (particularly, they can use up large amounts of video RAM, when loading images from file. This means that large images in books do not always render properly; I’m still looking for a solution to that one. DRM-Protected EPUBS Freda cannot read DRM-protected ePub books. The ADEPT DRM-protection mechanism that Adobe Digital Editions uses for securing DRM-protected content is incompatible with Open Source practice, because if you have access to the source code of an ADEPT-compatible book-reader, you can easily see how the ADEPT user key is stored on the user device, and write a modified version of the program that unlocks the book and saves the decrypted book data to file (rather than unlocking it and displaying it on screen). At some stage I may use my source code in a closed-source project to develop a reader program that will read DRM-protected books – but that is another story.

Bug Reports and Support Requests

Freda is a work in progress, and if you should happen to encounter any problems, I will be pleased to fix them. Bug Reports are best emailed to me at home@jim-chapman.net. Please include the words 'Freda bug' in the subject line and attach:

1. Freda's log file, which you will find on your device in \Program Files\Freda\logfile.txt.
2. The book you were opening or reading when the problem occurred.

Please give as much detail as you can about any message that Freda displayed when the problem happened. Support Questions that the manual does not satisfactorily address can be emailed to me; I will answer them, and add to the manual as necessary.







Download Freda free for Your Windows Mobile Phone
.mobi Mobile friendly download
Download Freda direct on your windows mobile phone
Copy this code into your website if you want to link to the Freda page: