直讀中文 cBook

I remember with fondness Ian Wong's 直讀中文 cBook app.

There used to be a time when I read a lot of ebooks and this is one of the apps that I regularly use.

I hear you asking, if it's just ebooks, why not just use Moon+ Reader or Google Play Books or a physical ebook reader like Kobo or Kindle?

The unique thing about cBook is that it can only render Chinese ebooks. Kobos and Kindles can also handle Chinese epubs and AZW/AZW3, but cBook presents the text the correct way - right to left and top to bottom.

Another interesting thing about cBook: it can only open ebooks from HaoDoo using the pdb and updb formats.

So I got a new tablet and installed the latest version of cBook from the Play Store - 4.0.0Beta5. The ebook download function doesn't seem to work anymore, so I had to manually copy over my old pdb/updb files to /cBook folder. The app seems to be able to locate the folder, but it's saying there are zero files within.

Went to Ian Wong's personal website to download old APKs of the app, but the Dropbox links are not working anymore. After a bit of searching, I found a copy of version 3.2.0. Installed that and it was actually able to see the ebooks.

After some testing, it turns out that cBook needs permission to "Files and Media", but doesn't ask for it. Once I granted the permission, cBook 4.0.0beta5 now works as expected.