Reading accesstoinsight.org site on nokia E63 without internet connection

Accesstoinsight (ati) has a huge collection of buddhists texts translated to English. Apart from the suttas, it is also a huge repository of teachings by many buddhist teachers. Besides the normal online browsing of the site, ati also has a feature where one can download the entire site and then access the pages on our PCs or Laptops or other devices without internet connection. The site downdoad feature is here.

For more convenience, the offline version can be viewed using devices like iphone or ipad or other ebook readers as explained here. I have a Nokia E63 mobile phone and have been looking for ways to put a copy of ati’s offline version on it. I was finally able to do that using the steps mentioned below:

1. Download the offline version of ati. Unzip the file. After unzipping you will get a folder named “ati_website”, inside which is another folder named “html” and a file “start.html”
2. Copy the “ati_website” folder into the SD card of your phone. I copied it in “E:/Web/” (Symbian devices like the e63 refer to the SD card as “E:”)
3. Now the actual software which we will be using to the browse the files. Download and install Opera Mobile from the opera site. (Install opera mobile, not opera mini. Opera mobile is a native symbian application while opera mini is java application. I could not get opera mini to read html files from the SD card)
4. Start Opera mobile. In the Address bar enter “file://localhost/E:/Web/ati_website/start.html” (without the quotes. also the path that you enter will depend on where you copied the ati_website folder on your phone). Once the path till the start.html file is typed in the address bar, press enter. If everything goes right, the front page of the ati offline site will appear. From there, you can click on the links to access all the other pages. Go to Menu -> Bookmarks and bookmark the start page, so that you dont have to enter the path into the address bar every time. To have more reading space on the relatively small screen of e63, I enabled full screen reading from the settings. Also the font size in the opera mobile is way smaller for my eyes at 100% zoom. I found that a zoom of 160% is good.

Below are some screenshots:

ATI front page on e63

Another ATI page on E63

The above method worked for me. I hope it will work on any other phone which can run the opera mobile browser (opera mobile runs on most symbian s60 devices).

Happy reading the Teachings of the Awakened!