Recently I’ve begun reading books on my HTC Touch just because of the ease and always having the book on-hand, but I ran into a problem with Word (the built-in resource for ebooks): when I quit Word I lost my place. I searched and searched for some way to bookmark my place in Word and finally gave up and resigned myself to getting a third-party ebook reader, settling on uBook Reader by GowerPoint.

uBook Reader really shines through as a reader, it can display pretty much any document file as well as image files. Of course it really helped me out when I would close the application and then return and was greeted with the same page I had exited with. The user interface is very nice, although not very touch friendly, and covers all of the Windows Mobile UI; also most of the UI is customizable — a huge plus. To choose a book you must click (or touch) the Start button and then choose “Open”, you won’t be greeted with your normal open dialog but a built-in screen that, once you get used to it, is a bit confusing.

After opening the book you will see your book and you can begin to read (if you are using the demo version you will be shown the uBook splash page every few pages to remind you that you aren’t using a registered copy). When you are ready to quit reading just click the Start button and choose “Exit”, there is no “x” button at the top right to press (the Go button will show the WM taskbar if you need to get to it without exiting uBook Reader).

Overall, uBook Reader is wonderful to use with a few quirks, but most have workarounds if you play with the app long enough. You can pick up a copy yourself at GowerPoint’s website for $15.