About 2 weeks ago I had an issue where the 505 froze after disconnecting from the PC. I had to reset it, then noticed that all the books and collections were missing (but not the user's manual or sample music).
When I reloaded the books, I noticed the following changes in behavior:

1) Actions over USB now happened very fast (book transfers and collection creation/reordering). The 505 used to behave like the 500, that is very slow USB.

2) All books (including ones from the Sony site) now have a long "fometting..." screen when initially opened or resized (once for each size, this seems to be cached). This was definitely not the case before the crash. This really makes it hard to "browse" books when deciding what to read next.

3) The "eBook Library" software is very hard to start now, when I start it the floppy drives are scanned and it there's anything in them the program does not open a window. I can see that it is running in Task Manager, but no window.

Any ideas how to fix this? I don't mind the fast USB transfers, but the formatting is very annoting. I don't see any settings anywhere.

the formatting is very annoting


How do you upload ebooks to the reader? Via eBook Library or drag&drop?
I am not sure, but I think "formatting" behaviour is the norm for the latter.

I use the ebook library, drag and drop to the main library, then from there to the Reader. Then I put the books on the Reader into collections.

The advantage to this is that the formatting seems to be done during the transfer process, and not on the Reader when you try to open the book (at least, I've never seen that before).

As a note, on my last set of book uploads the behavior was mixed: adding book to the library and transfer were slow again, the organizing of collections was fast, and the formatting delay was not seen for those books. So I presume it's a difference in the transfer itself.

The speed difference might also have to do with the size of the XML file that it has to write out.

Might be worth uninstalling and reinstalling the eBook Library Software, it sounds like it has become corrupted.