• The Palm MIK doesn't support a table of contents, index, or other structural entities.

For ebooks longer than a few pages, it's usually easier to adopt a more conventional ebook publication approach where you create content suitable for an ebook reader.

Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of ebook readers for the Palm OS organizer: those that read Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files, those that read the Palm Reader format, and those that read Doc files. There are other document viewers too, like Quickoffice and DataViz Documents to Go, but these aren't generally used for ebook publication. We'll take a closer look at the first three.

Adobe PDF
Several document readers, most notably Adobe Acrobat for Palm, can view Adobe PDF files. All sacrifice some PDF formatting in order to fit on the device, but they can be useful when you need to distribute an existing small PDF file to your staff.

Using PDF has several disadvantages, making it difficult to encourage daily usage. Chief among these problems is the generation of the PDF itself: unless you have a tool like Adobe Acrobat or Ghostscript installed, making a PDF can be difficult. Mac OS X users may wish to gloat here, as it's as simple as hitting "Print Preview" under Mac OS X. A second problem is that once you have the PDF, you must perform additional work with a translation program--generally available only on a PC (Mac OS X users can stop gloating)--to convert the PDF file to a format that the Palm OS application can use.

For example, Adobe Acrobat for Palm includes the Acrobat desktop, which lets you convert PDF files from desktop PDF format to .pdb files viewable with Adobe Acrobat for Palm on your Palm OS organizer. This application, presently available for Microsoft Windows, provides a drag-and-drop metaphor, installing the resulting documents on your Palm handheld at the next HotSync operation with a special conduit.

Once on the device, reading a PDF file is often not as convenient as an ebook in another format. Some applications drop more PDF formatting from many files than practical, leaving an ugly or incomprehensible jumble. Other applications, including the Adobe Acrobat for Palm, are simply too slow with large-scale documents to be of much use.

For all of these reasons, approach PDF carefully when considering Palm OS ebooks. Unless you have an existing PDF file for which you have no source, it's almost always worth using another format, such as HTML with a custom viewer or the Palm Reader format.

Palm Reader
By far my favorite format for Palm OS ebooks is the Palm Reader format. Previously the reader available from Peanut Press, the Palm Reader format uses a simple markup language to describe how an ebook should appear on the handheld. The following is the ebook I showed in HTML previously.