I've quit using the SD card

[ZenEngineer]

For the last 15 months I've been filling my 2Gb SD card with as many books and stories as I could harvest from the web. Some were .lrf and .epub, but most were .rtf and .pdf. I liked having a huge library available and didn't mind the large formatting times to load up .rtf and .pdf files. I didn't quite fill up the card and it was always great to impress people with the 1700 books/files on it. Still, the slowness was getting old.

Yesterday, while preparing to attend WorldCon, I decided to do two things: learn how to properly prepare an .rtf file for conversion to .lrf (and subsequently learn, by trial and error, the conversion settings I like on Calibre), and to only load up the main memory with the 20 novels and stories I'm likely to read in the next month.

Not having the SD card has sped up the 505 considerably. Having only .lrf files has made starting files and changing font sizes to be almost instantaneous. I am hoping that battery life will increase because of this change.

Eventually I will convert all of my library to .lrf and will fill up the SD card again, but I'll only slot it in if I'm bored with the choices in the main memory and don't have access to my laptop for quick file swaps.

[doreenjoy]

Interesting. Makes me tempted to convert all of my PDF and EPUB into LRF myself!

[Moejoe]

I find the opposite to be true, .lrf load much more slowly on my 505 and are bigger in size too. I'm all .epub, nothing else at this end.

[JSWolf]

I am preferring ePub because it means if I was to get another reader and it wasn't from Sony, it would at least have ADE on board and my ePub would still work. Plus, I use embedded fonts. And with ePub, I can get a nice looking font (I wuse Fontin and Fontin Sans) And I get more text per screen then I do with LRF.

[ZenEngineer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And with ePub, I can get a nice looking font (I wuse Fontin and Fontin Sans) And I get more text per screen then I do with LRF.

That's news to me. I'll look into it.

[pepak]

Originally Posted by ZenEngineer

That's news to me. I'll look into it.

You can do it even more easily with LRF - you can update the font used to render LRF/TXT/RTF with your own font, and all books will be using it immediately (rather than having to update each and every book as is the case of EPUB).

Just keep in mind that LRF is an end-format (you can't very well convert it to any other format), so keep the original files securely backed up for your future needs.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pepak

You can do it even more easily with LRF - you can update the font used to render LRF/TXT/RTF with your own font, and all books will be using it immediately (rather than having to update each and every book as is the case of EPUB).

Just keep in mind that LRF is an end-format (you can't very well convert it to any other format), so keep the original files securely backed up for your future needs.

If you change the fonts that LRF uses, you will then have to also change the fonts that eBook Library uses and retransfer all the LRF eBooks once again to the Reader so you can get proper pagination based on the replaced fonts. ePub allows embedding easily and you can put the fonts you want directly on the Reader. And ePub does not slow down with embedded fonts. Plus when you embed fonts in ePub, you can then get true bold, true italics, and true bold/italics. Want a symbol font? Want a small caps font? No problem.

[PieOPah]

I used to have a bunch of books loaded on my SD card but again, I stopped using it. This was mainly because I didn't really need it.

I very rarely have problems with the speed though since I never really turn the device off - I only put it in standby.

The only time when loading is an issue is after I have added some books or hooked up to the USB for charging. Even then it doesn't bother me since this is done during a time I wouldn't be reading anyway!

I have however recently found that using the 505 as a Card Reader is great when I need to put something on my Archos and haven't got the device specific USB cable with me

[richman]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If you change the fonts that LRF uses, you will then have to also change the fonts that eBook Library uses and retransfer all the LRF eBooks once again to the Reader so you can get proper pagination based on the replaced fonts. ePub allows embedding easily and you can put the fonts you want directly on the Reader. And ePub does not slow down with embedded fonts. Plus when you embed fonts in ePub, you can then get true bold, true italics, and true bold/italics. Want a symbol font? Want a small caps font? No problem.

Can you clarify a little bit more? I did do font hack on 505 and I do like LRF and I see italics and bold and other stuff when I load ebooks onto it in that format. I use calibre to convert my ebooks to LRF , and pages load fast.
I also have some ebooks in epub format too and they seem to work fine too. Are you saying that epub is better than LRF because there is no difference in load up times/format-zoom time/ page turns between the 2 formats on the 505. I have all my ebooks saved in seperate location so LRF is just used for the 505. I went with LRF format because others seem to suggest it was the best format for 505 and fastest to load stuff, is that wrong? You seem to suggest epub is better in every way, am I hearing you correctly?
What directory do you place your fonts in, I have a lot of them, so if you come back and say 'go epub" and LRF doesn't offer any advantages over epub I'll have to gather up my fonts and start a directory! I'm trying to get maximum battery life out the 505 and that is why I went with LRF format (because others seemed to say they experienced longer zoom formatting times and page formatting times with epub).

[am_mread]

I use my SD card when I'm converting a bunch of eBooks and want to view them my PRS505 quickly to verify the quality of the conversion. That way I don't have to to disconnect the reader from the computer for each book.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

Interesting. Makes me tempted to convert all of my PDF and EPUB into LRF myself!

Nothing loads faster than custom-sized (and non-image [i.e.: proper text] based) PDFs. Converting your PDFs into LRF will be likely to leave you with the worst of both worlds.

- Ahi