First, I am new to the site, and it's is wonderful.

Second, I am about to purchase a Sony Reader and cant wait. But I connected to the Sony Connect software and looked for some books and while doing so I noticed that those books that listed had what seemed to be numbers and % listed near them. IE: John Doe 76%.

What does that % mean? is it a rating by readers or popularity etc.

Just thought someone could tell me.

Thanks

Relevance to the search terms, I think.

Yes, it's relevance to the search terms.

Thanks guys.

What's funny about it (and points up Connect's shortcomings) is when you enter an author's name and a book with that author's name comes up with anything other than 100%.

The other totally ludicrous thing is when you enter a name, such as "Deborah Crombie" which is a complete name and would indicate to most people that I want to see ONLY books by her, that books by other authors whose names start with Deborah also come up, and then they show anything other than 0%.

I know, they may just be hoping that something in those other entries might catch my eye and get me to buy the book, I think they should have a selectable "Show me other books which might be similar" or "Only show me books which match the search term comletely" option so as to not waste my time.

The other totally ludicrous thing is when you enter a name, such as "Deborah Crombie" which is a complete name and would indicate to most people that I want to see ONLY books by her, that books by other authors whose names start with Deborah also come up, and then they show anything other than 0%.


Perhaps it's to cater for the situation where you know her as "Deborah Crombie", but her full name is "Deborah Crombie Smith", or something like that?

I would guess that the search engine is putting an "OR" condition between the multiple words - ie returning matches for either "Deborah" or "Crombie".

Considering the way the search worked before (which is to say ... not very well -- putting it mildly), the fact that it will find the authors' names at all is a big deal. That it also finds other 'similar' names doesn't really bother me much since it puts the full matches first. I will admit to a brief flare of annoyance when I find I've wandered into listings for authors that have the same first or last name. :shrug:

Everything about the site is so annoying, I try to use it as little as possible.

Anyhow, has anybody tried putting the two names of an author in quotes to see if that eliminates other names? Works for Google.

Come to think of it, if only Sony would hire Google as a consultant. :D

But the thing is, if you say type in the first name of the author correctly and make a typo on the last name, you have a chance of still finding the author you want. And it does show the author you want first and once you get past those books, you can go stop looking. I don't see what the issue is at all.

Excellent point, JSWolf. And yet another reason I only find it mildly annoying. :smug:

Excellent point, JSWolf. And yet another reason I only find it mildly annoying. :smug:
I'd rather have too many books shown then not enough. And it does it in a way that is not too annoying at all. And it means if I don't fully know the name of the book or the author, I still have a chance to find it if it is there. But seeing as once my $50 credit is gone, I'll probably just stick with LIT format books since I won't then be stuck with LRF books which I cannot do anything with outside the Sony. So if someday I was to decide to get a different reader, then I would be well and truly screwed.

It's great if you like vampires. In fact it's unintentionally funny sometimes. I was searching in the horror section and the results listing was book after book of Buffy-clone material categorised as "Vampire", and smack in the middle of it was "Salem's Lot" by Stephen King (a book about vampires for those who do not know), marked as "Other horror". Priceless.

Not so funny if you're looking for anything other than yet another Buffy-clone. :/

I'd rather have too many books shown then not enough. And it does it in a way that is not too annoying at all.Oh, I agree -- it's just that I'm always mildly annoyed when a search, any search, doesn't bring up exactly what I want, and nothing more (whether what I'm searching for doesn't exist). Of course that particular thing is a problem with my expectations, not the function of whatever search engine I'm using. :smug:

Well, apparently being so new to this, and still waiting for my Sony to be delivered, here is yet another noob alert question:

Certainly being less experienced pushes me in the direction of the Connect store. Heck I can search a book, buy it, download it and off I go. Easy for me. BUT... where else can I go to buy books (I alread know of the Gug. site, and I would like other than classic titles), download them and have it be as easy (relatively speaking) as the Connect exchange.

Basically, while I understand the ereader supports diff. formats, what "stores" out there have a wider selection that are compatible? Certainly in the lines of what's on the bookshelves now etc.

I am not opposed to "converting" formats to get them to work (although I would rather not just starting out here) but I am in search of seemless integration.

Any direction folks would be appreciated.
Cheers

Jeez, did any of that ^ make sense.

Sure, Stonecoldcrb, you're asking where else you can find e-books, preferably recent releases. Right?

If you like SciFi, you should check out Baen's ebook store, it's called Webscriptions (www.webscriptions.net), they sell their stuff in several formats, including RTF, with no DRM on the files. And they have a fair sized free library section to see if you like their offerings.

www.Fictionwise.com is another source, as is www.ebooks.com -- the Microsoft .LIT format is an easy one to convert, and removing the DRM is usually technically legal since said DRM disables the read aloud function, and it's legal to remove DRM that interferes with a 'Disabilities' related feature. (The best app to do that is apparently the unfortunately named 'convert lit' better known as 'clit' -- careful how you search for that one, especially at work http://www.mobileread.com/forums/images/smiliesadd1/uhoh2.gif).

Those are just of the top of my head, I'm sure others will have more suggestions. :nice:

Gotcha, thanks for being so helpful folks. I will def. check out those sites you suggested NatCh.

Do you guys favor one format over another for the PRS500? especially in terms of readily available content, and ease of getting the files to the reader itself? and/or those files that really dont have to be converted?

Additionally I should add.......I have a large number of books in PDF format that I want to take advantage of, and I am looking for a foolproof way to get them on the reader. I understand from what I've read here so far, that these particular files need to be converted to some other format?

In the end the selfish side of me wants the easiest route poss. to enjoy the most books on the reader with little fanfare. I learned a good saying when I was being taught how to surf.....one of the authorities on surfing taught "easy is good".

Know what I mean.

Hey, being helpful is just one of the many services we offer around here. :smug:

What format you favor depends on what you're wanting. You can use RTF files straight off your hard-drive, if you don't mind them not displaying pix. You might want to bump the font size to ~16 points, as the RTF engine seems to display them a bit on the small side. Word or Wordpad (to name the most obvious ones) will do that for you in a snap. (ctrl+a to select the entire text and ctrl+shift+> to increase the font size of everything in steps).

Using something like BookDesigner to make LRF files (Sony's BBeB format, that is) has a lot of following for files that are meant to be used/read repeatedly. It has the advantages of displaying inline pix, as well as being about 2/3 the size of the same file in RTF.

PDF files really don't work well unless the 'page size' that they're created with is pretty close to the display size of the Reader -- it scales the pages to the Reader's screen size and A4/letter pages are usually all but completely unreadable that way. :sad:

There are a number of apps discussed around the forum for slicing and dicing PDFs to make them fit well on the screen, and for extracting the text from the PDF to a more ... flexible format.

The real problem with PDF is that it isn't a book format, it's a page layout format. It's designed specifically for the purpose of making sure a document prints exactly the same for you as it does for me, even if it goes around the planet several times in getting from one to the other. The only reason that people have tried to use it for books is that Adobe brilliantly offered its PDF reader app to the whole solar-system for free, which pretty much means that anyone anywhrere can open the files. Unfortunately, they also named it "Acrobat Reader" which makes book people think that it's good for reading stuff in, which isn't exactly the same in a book context.

It's possible that Adobe's Digital Editions will help with that situation, but we'll have to see what they end up doing. :shrug:

I agree that easy is good if it gets you the same results as difficult. But sometimes easy is just easy, and it gets you something you don't like, where a bit less easy would get you something you love.

Unfortunately, due to the effect we call 'the tower of e-babel,' there are about two dozen significant e-book formats out there (and about three score less significant ones), which makes it difficult sometimes to even tell which file will work with what reader. Not a good or easy situation, but until a 'standard' e-book format is accepted by the world at large, it's one we pretty much have to deal with if we want to e-read. :sad3:

Thanks a ton Nat........

and a nicely put reply you posted up. I will continue to mess around with things. Course it'll be easier when I actually get the reader delivery this coming week. I will go back to the Sony site and check to see what formats are acceptable for the device, then I will work myself into frustration with it all.........lol.

In the end I may just be able to read a book or two.

The formats that the Reader accepts are:

- Plain text
- RTF (but pictures don't show up on the Reader)
- Word Doc (automatically converted to RTF when loaded)
- PDF (but see the restrictions noted in earlier messages)
- LRF (the Reader's native format, and by far the most flexibe)

RTF is fine for stuff that you're going to read once and then throw away. Stuff that's a "keeper" it's well worthwhile taking the time to use a tool like "Book Designer" to convert to LRF. That way you get support for pictures, a table of contents, etc.

It's important to note, though that the Reader will only import Word Doc files IF you happen to have Word installed on your computer so that Connect can call on it to convert to RTF.

For those of us who choose not to use Microsoft Word, even if we download or otherwise have a Word Doc file on our computer, need to do the conversion to RTF manually, using our word processor.

Good point - Word is so ubiquitous that it's sometimes easy to overlook the fact that not everybody has it.

It's important to note, though that the Reader will only import Word Doc files IF you happen to have Word installed on your computer so that Connect can call on it to convert to RTF.

For those of us who choose not to use Microsoft Word, even if we download or otherwise have a Word Doc file on our computer, need to do the conversion to RTF manually, using our word processor.
Even that isn't enough! You also have to have a Windows PC so you can install the Connect software. If, for example, you have a Mac with a copy of Word you are S.O.L. -- Sony doesn't provide the Connect software on any platform other than Windows.

Of course, based on my experience with it at my sister's place over the Xmas holidays, you well might not want to have the Connect software in any case. The libprs500 library is almost as good, and is improving steadily. And it runs on Mac and Linux as well as Windows.