Hi everyone, i'm new to this forum and recently thinking about buying a ebook reader. Thanks for the posts here so I get to know quite a few options, Nokia 770, Sony reader, ... etc.

When comparing different screen sizes, it occured to me that PSP (sony's playstation portable) can actually be a promising candidate, despite its *official* identity as a gaming device. A few google searches reveal that there's actually a community developing third-party softwares for the (hacked) PSP, among them is the so-called PSPpdf, which is supposedly to handle pdf files. Does anyone here have any experience with this? Any rumor whether the outcome is comparable with the more standard e-reader?

albireo, I tried it an early version of psppdf and the outcome wasn't great, but it worked. The PSP screen is fine for reading short e-books, though, if are serious about it, you should consider getting an E Ink device (easier for the eye).

Hi everyone, i'm new to this forum and recently thinking about buying a ebook reader. Thanks for the posts here so I get to know quite a few options, Nokia 770, Sony reader, ... etc.

When comparing different screen sizes, it occured to me that PSP (sony's playstation portable) can actually be a promising candidate, despite its *official* identity as a gaming device. A few google searches reveal that there's actually a community developing third-party softwares for the (hacked) PSP, among them is the so-called PSPpdf, which is supposedly to handle pdf files. Does anyone here have any experience with this? Any rumor whether the outcome is comparable with the more standard e-reader?

If you thinking of using the PSP to mostly read then avoid it... I've got a PSP and a Illiad, and there is no comparision. The PSP has a great screen for playing games and showing movies, but viewing books is chore. The aspect ratio is completely wrong...

I tried reading pdfs on the PSP by converting pdfs to a set of jpgs and it was troublesome due to constant zoom + pan... And I tried converting chm -> html to read on the PSP's browser. Better, but the screen isn't something you want to stare out like you would a e-ink...

And remember that if you want to run homebrew software you need to downgrade the Os, and this risks bricking the device... If your in the USA then get a Sony Reader, or if you like to live dangerously ;) get an Illiad....

So get the machine that most fits your target use, otherwise you'll be disappointed.

I only registered to answer your question, but I think I`ll stick around cause this seems like a very nice place. :)

I currently have a Sony PSP and I use it extensively as an ebook reader. I bought it for very cheap (second hand) and I was secretely hoping it would turn out to be a good reader, besides support for games, movies and music.

Much to my (pleasant) surprise, things have turned out quite well. I started out using PSPPdf and later on the browser reading html formatted ebooks, but quickly realized that reading like that is more of a burden than anything else; spent lots of time trying to come up with the perfect font and got really annoyed to see it didn`t save the position when exiting the browser.

Without trying to lengthen the post unnecessarily even more, I found this awesome piece of homebrew called bookr (http://bookr.sf.net/) which supports PDF files natively and, even better, TXT files as well. I found reading PDF much more difficult than TXT because the screen is way too small and moving + zooming around to read a single page gets very annoying after a while.

However reading simple TXT is absolutely great, at least by my standards. I use a black background, a very light cream text color and Arial as font (it supports custom fonts too) -- I`ll have to experiment a bit more with fonts, I`m sure I can find something better. Using minimal backlight (which is not only enough, but recommended, it`s a lot easier on the eyes) the battery lasts about 7-8 hours. shortcuts can be customized to your liking, which makes it much easier to flip through pages; while it supports bookmarking, it also remembers the current position in the file when you exit the program and it stores that information separately for each opened file, so you can read more books at once without problems.

Screenshots of bookr can be found here (http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=149290).

Actually gaming is the least I use my PSP for nowadays, it`s mostly reading, listening to podcasts and watching movies. :D It has to be the best investment I ever made and I wish more PSP users would know about the existence of bookr. I am considering to buy an eInk device, but not now, perhaps in a few years after the technology matures a bit more and reader prices drop significantly. Until then I`ll be perfectly satisfied with my PSP.

I only registered to answer your question, but I think I`ll stick around cause this seems like a very nice place. :)Welcome to MobileRead, khayman! Please do stick around, it is a very nice place. :nice:

Excellent first post, BTW. :yes: