Other languages? Japanese?

[Aku]

Hello, considering a PRS505SC for my wife, she reads stacks of books and they are expensive as they are imported. Problem is they are in Japanese and was wondering if this unit supports books in Japanese and if so does enyone know where to get them? I tried typing "PRS505SC" at amazon.co.jp but is wasn't listed. I'm trying to surprise her for her birthday next month and save on import costs.

[keng2000]

You can find it on ebay or sonysite.com. It sells in North America (US and Canada) and European country.
If you read in PDF format, It is embedded fonts. Yes, you can read Japanese PDF books. For other formats ypu need more trick. (also modified Japanese Menu)
I have done wirh my Thai Language. The others did their own too.
See prscustomizer.com and in dev forum

[mbagsh55]

Hi Aku,
I'm based in Japan so can confirm that while the Sony can support Japanese in PDF format, you will not have any luck finding any (legal) source of Japanese books for it with the exception of out-of-copyright works that you can download for free.

[Aku]

Thank you both for your input, especially about the no japanese books electronically. Ohh well, At Least I tried...

[igorsk]

Actually, there are plenty of current Japanese ebooks available (and a lot of e-manga), but they mostly use formats which are currently not convertible. Two most prominent right now seem dotBook and XMDF. Here's a few links to shops.
インプレスジャパン ダイレクト http://direct.ips.co.jp/book/impressjapan.cfm
ウェブの書斎 http://www.shosai.ne.jp/
電子書店パピレス http://www.papy.co.jp/
BitwayBooks http://books.bitway.ne.jp/
PDAbook http://pdabook.jp/pdabook/
楽天ダウンロード http://dl.rakuten.co.jp/book/
SpaceTownブックス http://books.spacetown.ne.jp/sst/

And of course, the Japanese counterpart to Project Gutenberg is Aozora Bunko: http://www.aozora.gr.jp/

[mbagsh55]

Originally Posted by igorsk

Actually, there are plenty of current Japanese ebooks available (and a lot of e-manga), but they mostly use formats which are currently not convertible.

...

And of course, the Japanese counterpart to Project Gutenberg is Aozora Bunko: http://www.aozora.gr.jp/

Entirely correct. I gave up trying to find a means of converting XMDF books from my Sharp Zaurus a couple of years ago, so do not find any of the currently available formats usable (on a Sony Reader).

I have converted some Aozora Bunko to PDF, using BlueSkyReader (Macintosh based) to produce vertical text with furigana which displays well, but is limited to the out-of-copyright text available. I don't know if it is possible to do the same with ADE books, but I could not find a way of getting LRF to support vertical text and furigana, so did not bother with changing the reader fonts.

Regards,
Marcus

[igorsk]

BBeB format does support vertical text and furigana but 1) you will likely need to make some changes in Calibre for that or use the official converter and 2) I'm not sure if Reader supports vertical rendering.

[hidari]

Originally Posted by mbagsh55

Hi Aku,
I'm based in Japan so can confirm that while the Sony can support Japanese in PDF format, you will not have any luck finding any (legal) source of Japanese books for it with the exception of out-of-copyright works that you can download for free.

Good to know That I am not the only Sony 505 owner in Japan. I have used PDF format as well on the reader but not vertically.

[mbagsh55]

Originally Posted by igorsk

BBeB format does support vertical text and furigana but 1) you will likely need to make some changes in Calibre for that or use the official converter and 2) I'm not sure if Reader supports vertical rendering.

Hey Igorsk,
You really are a treasure trove of information!

I wasn't sure what you meant by the official converter, since the Sony ebook Library (version 2.5) doesn't appear to offer conversion to vertical text and furigana, so I had a search around and found a Japanese Windows application called ChainP (http://no722.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/) that supports conversion to BBeB. It is using images (JPG) to manage this but my prs-700 displays the output without problems.

Cheers,
Marcus

[igorsk]

The official converter is the Xylog Parser DLL provided by Sony. You can download it from www.prslabs.com (needs free registration). It is used by e.g. lrs2lrf.exe I made a few years ago.
You can also try some other tools for LRF generation from here. However, most of them are old and produce LRF files for Librie which are not always handled well by Reader.