First of all, excuse some mistakes, I'm not very good at technical English...

So, I want to ask you (just theoretically) - would it be possible to make a hack for PRS505 that would allow us to search inside the books? I'm not very skilled in this hacking and flashing, I don't know the possibilities of the device, I'm just asking.

Oh it is very possible

Really possible? As I read all the reviews, the lack of search feature is the second most mentioned drawback of PRS505 (the first one is the pdf zooming problem, solved by rasterfarian or conversion to another format). By the way, I looked closely at the hacks list. Those "hacker guys" are doing an incredible job!

Personally, I doubt it...

Oh it is very possible

Can you convince somebody to do it? ;)

Well, it is possible to search the dictionary (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22320), so why not books? ;-) (Of course I understand it is something different and of course more difficult, but it would be nice...)

I would say that the lack of this feature makes the 505 useless as a research tool. Sony should be providing this themselves.

well it definitely halts my need to digitize all my reference material

If you open Ebook library on your computer and view a book there is a search function at the top right of the screen.
(I agree that this isn't a complete solution, but it is a small help.)

I know it can be done, because it can be done on the Kindle. If you are looking at your library and type in a word to search, it will bring up a list of all the books containing that word.

So ... absolutely it is possible to do. It's just a matter of Sony deciding to implement it.

Theoretically it can be done, but it will be a challenge and a lot of work.

It is trivial to search through text files, in the link you provided (the dictionary) we used the 'grep' utility to search an ASCII file.
However searching through binary files is not so trivial. A the PRS-500/5 supports a good number of binary files. You will need to read the file and know how to handle the binary encoding. Usually this requires writing much software and require the developer to be familiar with the binary structure. Sometimes API are provided that do reduce the amount of knowledge the developer must have in order to read through the file.

At this point you can do a search. In addition some files are compressed text such as ePub that is a zipped HTML, but may also include images (binary).


So the binary files you wold have to read are (may be missing some)
PDF, RTF, LRF, LRX,
Compressed HTML(text) and images
EPUB

You might want to first start with ASCII(text) files then slowly start adding binaries to your search program. I'd recommend the next file after the txt be either EPUB or RTF.

=X=

Then there is the whole stumbling block of user input of a search string.

This reminds me of my former career: I was the senior programmer at my last employer for 6 years before deciding to go back into electronics. VPs were always trying to add things to a project. Sometimes vastly extending the scope of a program, sometimes after most of the code for the original spec was already written.

The capabilities of this reader were known (or available to be known) before purchase for all of us. Buy the product which fits your needs and put an end to the requests for kludgey-shoehorn additions!

The capabilities of this reader were known (or available to be known) before purchase for all of us. Buy the product which fits your needs and put an end to the requests for kludgey-shoehorn additions!

We also knew there was no delete for books on the device and no ability to read in the epub format. And yet, now these features are available.

I am happy with my Sony, but I see no harm in hoping for or driving improvements where possible.