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I have Tracfone LG840G it is a dumb phone (as opposed to a smart phone). I looked around at Tracfone, and did not find an ebook reader app (but I might not have looked hard enough). When I do a web search I find some sites claiming to sell ebook readers for my phone, but they don't look reliable/legitimate.

I have Calibre to convert easily to any common format, so I don't care what format the reader uses. But would prefer not to have a subscription based app, something I can get for free or pay for once would be best.

Is there an application or down load I can get for my phone, that will let me read ebooks on a Tracfone LG840G?

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  • This seems like a "Shopping question".
    – Sekhemty
    Jan 8, 2014 at 17:44
  • Related meta discusion meta.ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/138/…
    – James Jenkins
    Jan 9, 2014 at 15:33
  • This is asking for a single solution. That there may be more than one potential solution does not make it a bad question. If the question asked what apps are out there for X then it is more of a shopping list question.
    – Chad
    Jan 16, 2014 at 17:01

2 Answers 2

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You should be able to use the browser or UC Browser/Opera Mini to read HTML files from an SD card, that is the best chance to get something usable.

An alternative would be to render the ebook to PNG images and browse the image on the phone, but this takes much more memory.

You can also open plain text files from your SD card using the build in File Browser and read them in the viewer (there might be limitations on the file size).

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That device is capable of running J2ME applications. Java 2 Micro Edition is an older runtime environment for applications. EPUB reading software for J2ME exists, like Albite Reader. J2ME is often limited in the amount of memory that applications can use. So it probably is be a good idea to split books into smaller chunks (e.g. chapters) if possible.

If you know Calibre or other ebook software (e.g. Sigil) that allows you to convert books it is also possible to convert to HTML (which is not much more than unpacking and maybe the creation of a TOC document) and use the browser. Most browsers work for this; the most notable exception is Opera Mini (that has been suggested here,to my astonishment). This browser can't render HTML or access local HTML files. You would have to work with a lot of tedious and unnecessary manual work arounds. Additional you can't change the text size without reloading pages from the net so any offline capability would be moot then. But most other "real" HTML browsers will work.

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  • Indeed - you could install Opera Mini and store documents as "offline pages" for reading.
    – Nathan Osman
    Jan 11, 2014 at 4:01
  • Opera Mini is actually the worst choice in this context as it is not an HTML browser (it displays server generated OBML) and can't load local files, i.e. books saved on the device itself.
    – his
    Jan 11, 2014 at 4:42
  • But if you have the documents in a publicly accessible location, you can bring them up and then save them for offline viewing.
    – Nathan Osman
    Jan 11, 2014 at 8:29
  • You want to convert every file to HTML, put them on a server, and then access every single file by hand, and save for offline viewing, instead of just putting them on the SD card and use a "real" browser? Plus Opera Mini afterwards does not allow you to change the text size as it does no rendering, only displaying. It is using few resources, but if a real browser (i.e. one with offline rendering) or epub reader works, I would not use it for this purpose.
    – his
    Jan 11, 2014 at 8:46

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