I have a Sony Reader I purchased back at the beginning of the year. The first thing I did was go out to Baen's website and download all the free books I could find and start reading.

Unfortunately one of the books I was looking forward to re-reading on my new toy, March Upcountry (http://webscription.net/ps-267-84-march-upcountry.aspx) by John Ringo and David Weber, wasn't working. The problem came about when I went to read the file. It showed that the book was only 1 page long and when I tried to open that page I got a message saying something along the lines of "Page doesn't exist." (I'm at work right now and its at home so I don't have the exact wording)

Last night I had the thought that maybe the images in the file were causing the problem. So I went in and removed all the maps I found at the end of the file and lo and behold the file would open. Before the deletion the file was over 10MB, after it was just over 1MB.

Has anyone else run into this or a similar problem? I've got it working now but I was stumped for 2 months and I was wondering if this was a problem with the file or maybe a limitation of the reader.

I think several others have seen a similar issue before, both with really big 'all text' files as well as with files that had lots of pix in them. But RTFs seem to be a lot more stable after the Firmware/ConnSoft update. So, I guess I'm asking if you've done the update, and if it still gives you the problem afterward? :nice:

I had one file that choked the Reader (went into a spontaneous soft-reset) when I went to the L size text before, but it takes it in stride since the update. :shrug:

I think several others have seen a similar issue before, both with really big 'all text' files as well as with files that had lots of pix in them. But RTFs seem to be a lot more stable after the Firmware/ConnSoft update. So, I guess I'm asking if you've done the update, and if it still gives you the problem afterward? :nice:

I had one file that choked the Reader (went into a spontaneous soft-reset) when I went to the L size text before, but it takes it in stride since the update. :shrug:

Huh! Y'know I did the update last night also, I just didn't try the original file after the update. I'll try it out when I get home tonight and see if its behaving or if I still need to use the modified file.

As a side question does anyone know if Sony is going to add support for pics in RTF files to the Reader or is that on the wish list? I ask because some of those BAEN e-books have some good sized pics in them and if they're not going to add support for that I may just go through and remove them from the files for easier storage.

For Baen books you could try HTML2LRF (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9118) with the baen.py script (though you need to know how to use commandline).

The picture thing is definitely on our wish list. :yes:

I just tried the March Upcountry file (no modification, just download and xfer to the Reader) and it worked fine, though the maps don't show, of course. Hopefully that means that you should be in good shape. :nice:

The picture thing is definitely on our wish list. :yes:

I just tried the March Upcountry file (no modification, just download and xfer to the Reader) and it worked fine, though the maps don't show, of course. Hopefully that means that you should be in good shape. :nice:

Very, very definitely on the wish list :grin:. RTF pictures would make this already excellent device even better.

"March Upcountry" worked fine for me "pre-update", by the way. The size limit on RTF files used to be somewhere between about 10MB and 13MB - I don't know what, if any, impact the update has had on this.

Very, very definitely on the wish list :grin:. RTF pictures would make this already excellent device even better.

"March Upcountry" worked fine for me "pre-update", by the way. The size limit on RTF files used to be somewhere between about 10MB and 13MB - I don't know what, if any, impact the update has had on this.

Hrmm...Thats 2 votes for a working unaltered March Upcountry file. I tried mine last night and the unaltered file still doesn't work for me. Could it be a problem with the cache file on the Reader for that book?

I s'pose it's possible, a hard reset would certainly erase the cache file, along with everything else on the Reader, of course -- a bit drastic if you've got any other option. :wink:

If you haven't already, you might try re-downloading the file from Baen. Couldn't hurt anything, and it's a lot less trouble than a hard reset. :shrug:

Sorry - I must retract my statement. I had "March Upcountry" on my Reader, but hadn't actually tried to read it. I've just tried and get an "Invalid Page" error on the Reader.

I'll do some experiments and see what needs to be done to make it work...

Apologies for the misinformation.

OK, the results of my experiments are as follows. First of us, I deleted the version I had on the Reader which, as I say, didn't work.

I then re-downloaded the original version from Baen (10,598kb). This worked fine.

I deleted the file again from Reader, and did my "standard" Baen processing in Word ("Ctrl+Shift+>" twice to bump up the font size, then "File/Properties" to set the author and title) and re-saved it. The size shrank to 6,255kb. I copied this to Reader and it still worked fine.

I think we can conclude, therefore, that with the original version of Connect and the Reader's firmware, it screwed up. With the new firmware and Connect, both the original and my "re-processed" version work fine.

On a related issue, can anyone confirm that there is a 1000-page limit on PDF files? (Not that the last half of a 1000-page PDF file is readable anyway, page turns are extreme;y slow). This was a book reformatted with large print (so the PDF file was not that big) plus embedded font.

I think we can conclude, therefore, that with the original version of Connect and the Reader's firmware, it screwed up. With the new firmware and Connect, both the original and my "re-processed" version work fine.
I think you may have hit the nail on the head, at least with reference to this book. The "bad" copy I have on my reader was transferred with the original CONNECT software and firmware, twice. Neither time worked, so I hadn't tried to re-transfer it again. I'll try re-transferring now that I have the new firmware and CONNECT software and let you know.