THEBRIX  Back after a month or so of using it. It is still the best ebook reader I have used (and I have used a few, both on PDAs/smartphones and on desktops) because the authors have taken a great deal of effort to present books clearly. I was surprised, on briefly using an Amazon Kindle, to find out that Gutenberg texts are presented as they are input, with no attempt to clean them up.

The previous commentator is misguided because there is a big distance from a raw ASCII file downloaded from Project Gutenberg's Web site to something which is reasonably pleasant to read on-screen; all texts contain lengthy doses of boilerplate legal and licensing information and, especially with older text, hard formatting (chapter headings, page headings, page numbers, tables of contents etc.) which takes no account of the actual screen size and looks dreadful on anything not 80x24 (?) characters. As well as the hyphenation bug noted earlier ...

I mark Voluminous down slightly because I still feel it is a bit expensive and because the new output to text file outputs the original Gutenberg text, not the parsed and cleaned text (which shows how untidy the raw text frequently is!) - a slight annoyance.

Now ... can we have an Apple ebook reader?  (Version 1.0.3)

UNCOY  Unbelievable direct ripoff of Project Gutenberg. All these books are easily available in text, doc and pdf format here: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

It's clowns like this who give Mac shareware a bad name. Turning freeware volunteer labour into payware for the naive.  (Version 1.0)

THEBRIX  Very slick - simple but powerful interface with Spotlight-like searches for anything and with a lot of nice touches (for example, resize the window and the book text resizes accordingly), and the full screen view is particularly good; I am also impressed by the inbuilt styles, which are clear and effective without distracting effects or bright colours.

The application automatically putting books into Library of Congress categories is very helpful when trying to find things, although it is a pity that about 40% of the Gutenberg catalogue appears not to be classified at the moment.

The only minor problem I have come across at the moment is that hyphenation is not removed or redone - I see text such as "bor- rowed" and "news- papers" in the book I am reading. However, having tried to do this sort of thing in the past, I know how hard it is to knock glitches out of Gutenberg text, and the authors have done an excellent job for v1.0.

Some might think that the application is a bit expensive (£15/$30) for what it does, but there is a lot going on under the bonnet and I will be buying it soon.  (Version 1.0)