Would You Like Some Heroin To Go With That Crack(Berry)?

With all the interest around e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle and its new Apple iPhone app, it's no wonder that Research in Motion's ubiquitous BlackBerry also is getting some attention, with the launch of the eReader Pro for the device.

The free application, from Fictionwise's eReader.com, works across a slew of models of the BlackBerry.

For Fictionwise and eReader.com, the news marks the latest sign of booming interest in e-books. Last week, in an effort to better capitalize on the trend, book retail giant Barnes & Noble acquired Fictonwise and said it plans to use the company as part of its overall digital strategy, which includes the launch of an e-book store later this year.

I'm being slightly facetious in that I don't expect to be doing a lot of heavy reading on my BlackBerry; the screen, after all, is only 2 1/2 inches in diameter, compared to the Kindle's comparatively roomy 6 inches. I don't even find browsing the web on my BlackBerry to be particularly enjoyable, since most web sites still don't show well on the small screens of smartphones.

But in the interests of actually knowing what I'm talking about, I downloaded the eReader software onto my BlackBerry (as well as onto my laptop, for comparative reasons). After a little bit of hassle setting up my account (large screens always are better than small screens for scanning instructions), I was ready to go. I decided to download from eReader's menu of 25 free ebooks The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss, which won out over, among others, The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward--A New Approach (I'm weird that way). I downloaded the ebook on both my BlackBerry and laptop.

The eReader has some cool features. Among them, you can change the font settings and bookmark where you leave off if you're not finished. (Of course, the other great feature is that it's free, compared to the $359 you have to shell out for a Kindle.)

As to the reading experience itself, on the laptop, it's absolutely great. The text is set against a parchment background, and the font and type size make reading a pleasure.

On the BlackBerry, it's serviceable: Plain text against a white background. Also, you can see maybe one-fourth as many words on the BlackBerry screen as you can on the laptop. The novel has 3,617 pages (or screens) on the BlackBerry, nearly three times the number of pages on the laptop.

And while I don't imagine myself plowing through the entire book on my BlackBerry, eReader does add a nice new feature to a device I already have a hard time putting down. Just what I need.