project gutenberg supported by sony 505 ?

[redwunz]

hi, i'm new to this forum and i am still making up my mind as to whether I should get the sony reader. One key question revolves around the availability of books. for example, does the sony reader support of these books from project gutenberg?

[Nate the great]

The majority of the books on PG are plain text files, lacking pictures, table of contents, etc. Conversion is recommended no matter what device you choose.

The nice thing about the Sony Reader is our growing collection of ebooks from PG that we have converted for it.

[JSWolf]

Plus a number not from PG as well. I have done a fair number of books not from PG. Ones of a more recent publication date.

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by redwunz

hi, i'm new to this forum and i am still making up my mind as to whether I should get the sony reader. One key question revolves around the availability of books. for example, does the sony reader support of these books from project gutenberg?

Only PDF and Sony's proprietary LRF formats are supported. No TXT, HTML, etc. That is why people here are posting all those LRF ebooks, quite a few of which started with Gutenberg content. At some point, the new epub format should be supported on the 505 when Adobe finishes porting Digital Editions to it.

It is the limited format support on the Sony that makes me seriously consider the new Cybook. And if you are needing a larger e-ink screen, the iLiad also has better format support than the Sony, although the iLiad costs a lot more.

[BobVA]

Originally Posted by redwunz

... for example, does the sony reader support of these books from project gutenberg?

Hi - welcome aboard.

It's pretty easy to put PG texts on the Reader, but you do have to save them in a format the it understands. The simplest is RTF, supported by many word processors.

I usually go for the .htm PG version, since it will probably look better than the bare bones .txt version. In Microsoft Word I then just do a "select all", font increase of +3 or +4, update the Title and Author in the document properties and, finally, I usually set the font to Arial. Poof! Usually it's ready for the Reader in about a couple of minutes, particularly if you use a macro that does everything but the title/author with one button.


At that point you can dump it into the Reader via the Connect software or just put it on an SD card.

Manybooks.net can do the conversion to the Sony specific .lrf format on the fly when you download. They have many of the PG books.

There are tools here on MR that allow you to do much more sophisticated formatting of ebooks, but that's a mostly matter of personal preference. A lightly edited .rtf works fine for me, but you may want a more complex layout or need some of the technical features only available in .lrf or .pdf format (illustrations, linked table of contents, etc)

Note that although pdf works on the Reader, it's only really practical if formatted for the "page size" of the reader's screen. Trying to read a PDF sized for A4 or US letter size paper is very difficult. There are tools here to help with that as well.

Regards,
Bob

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by jbenny

Only PDF and Sony's proprietary LRF formats are supported. No TXT, HTML, etc. That is why people here are posting all those LRF ebooks, quite a few of which started with Gutenberg content. At some point, the new epub format should be supported on the 505 when Adobe finishes porting Digital Editions to it.

It is the limited format support on the Sony that makes me seriously consider the new Cybook. And if you are needing a larger e-ink screen, the iLiad also has better format support than the Sony, although the iLiad costs a lot more.

The 505 DOES support text. So you can download PG text and read it as is. No idea how good or bad it would look. If it does not look good on the 505, the text won't look good on any reading device without cleaning up/formatting. Yes the 505 does not support HTML out of the box, but html2lrf does an excellent and easy job of converting html to lrf for reading on the 505. So html support is not really a problem. And taking a text file and formatting it into RTF or LRF is fairly easy. As of now, the Cybook Gen3 does not support RTF. The 505 does.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jbenny

Only PDF and Sony's proprietary LRF formats are supported. No TXT, HTML, etc.

No, that is not entirely correct. The Reader does support text and RTF formats (although not HTML).

[kacir]

Originally Posted by redwunz

... availability of books. for example, does the sony reader support of these books from project gutenberg?

Sony Reader supports basically all books you can view in a PC. You can always use your PC to reformat the book for the Reader. The Reader even supports plain text files. They do not look nice, but you can read them. (**) The only unsupported books are some password protected or DRM protected files.

I suggest you to use a word processor, like OpenOffice.org or MSWord, and format the book into rtf. Set small margins, appropriate font - I suggest Arial or Helvetica , size 16 - and save text as rtf. Then load it into the Reader. You should experiment with formatting, until you find format that suits your taste

You can also use pre-formated files from http://manybooks.net/ and similar sites.

Also scroll to the top of THIS page and click on E-Books. There are some 2000 books ready for instant reading here.

Search those forums. You will find many references to free e-books
There are many, many sites that offer some free content.
Like www.craphound.com
or www.baen.com


(**) I *really* can not understand why Sony did not make txt file viewer configurable. It can't be that difficult to let user choose one of three font families or set the margin width.

[bowerbird]

notice how often this issue comes up.

but i guess i don't have to tell _you_ that, do i? ;+)

-bowerbird

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No, that is not entirely correct. The Reader does support text and RTF formats (although not HTML).

I stand corrected. I never see these formats mentioned, so I did not think they were supported. Although it seems from Kacir's comment that the usability of the reader (at least with TXT) is not what it should be. I figured there must be some reason that all those Gutenberg ebooks were getting converted to LRF.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jbenny

I stand corrected. I never see these formats mentioned, so I did not think they were supported.

No problem!

Although it seems from Kacir's comment that the usability of the reader (at least with TXT) is not what it should be. I figured there must be some reason that all those Gutenberg ebooks were getting converted to LRF.

Lots of reasons. Virtually all text files have hard carriage returns at the end of lines, so you get line breaks in funny places on the Reader. You can easily enough get rid of these with, say, a Word macro, but going the extra step of converting to LRF lets you select a nicer font, add a table of contents, improve the formatting - all that kind of stuff. Even 5 minutes spend tidying up a text file in that way can dramatically improve it.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by jbenny

Although it seems from Kacir's comment that the usability of the reader (at least with TXT) is not what it should be.

txt file is displayed on reader using monospaced font - something like courier new on Windows or a font on an old text-only computer terminal.

Originally Posted by jbenny

I figured there must be some reason that all those Gutenberg ebooks were getting converted to LRF.

The thing is that you have to do some conversion in order to read the book onthe reader. You have at least remove excess hard returns. And when you have the file opened on a pc, why not convert it to the format that is "natural" for Reader. lrf file opens a little bit faster (that means you use less battery), pageturns and change of font size are a little bit faster with lrf files...
I personally use rtf files, because for me that is "the path of the least resistance". I have a set of macros written in Vim text editor that processes the "naked ascii text" for me and then I format it in OOo Writer. I have a macro in OpenOffice.org Writer that formats a book for me in a very short time (sets margins, font, paragraph spacing and other cosmetic things). The problem is, you have to do it manually, because each book is slightly different and you have to see the result. Some books have too many hard returns (like PG texts), other books use non-standard characters that do not display well on Reader (like super fancy typographic quotes, em dashes, en dashes '...' characters, funny formating characters). It is not a problem to format a book and it takes only a very short time once you have some practice.

Go ahead and download some book from Gutengerg and you will see. The biggest problem is that it is in "vanilla ASCII" format with lines 80 characters long. The Reader display is not wide enough to display EXACTLY 80 characters so you end up with a very ragged looking text. Like this:


THE BROTHERS GRIMM
FAIRY TALES


THE GOLDEN BIRD

A certain king had a beautiful garden, and in the garden stood a tree
which bore golden apples. These apples were always counted, and about
the time when they began to grow ripe it was found that every night
one of them was gone. The king became very angry at this, and ordered
the gardener to keep watch all night under the tree. The gardener set
his eldest son to watch; but about twelve o'clock he fell asleep, and
in the morning another of the apples was missing. Then the second son
was ordered to watch; and at midnight he too fell asleep, and in the
morning another apple was gone. Then the third son offered to keep
watch; but the gardener at first would not let him, for fear some harm
should come to him: however, at last he consented, and the young man
laid himself under the tree to watch. As the clock struck twelve he
heard a rustling noise in the air, and a bird came flying that was of
pure gold; and as it was snapping at one of the apples with its beak,
the gardener's son jumped up and shot an arrow at it. But the arrow
did the bird no harm; only it dropped a golden feather from its tail,
and then flew away. The golden feather was brought to the king in the
morning, and all the council was called together. Everyone agreed that
it was worth more than all the wealth of the kingdom: but the king
said, 'One feather is of no use to me, I must have the whole bird.'

Then the gardener's eldest son set out and thought to find the golden
bird very easily; and when he had gone but a little way, he came to a
wood, and by the side of the wood he saw a fox sitting; so he took his
bow and made ready to shoot at it. Then the fox said, 'Do not shoot
me, for I will give you good counsel; I know what your business is,
and that you want to find the golden bird. You will reach a village in
the evening; and when you get there, you will see two inns opposite to

[Hadrien]

Nice demo Kacir ^^

For the PRS-505, you can also expect .epub support in the upcoming months.
You'll find plenty of classics formatted nicely on Feedbooks: table of contents, chapter headers, hyphenation on PDF files etc...
http://www.feedbooks.com

[jbenny]

From your example, the Sony takes the text as-is and displays it. I just loaded up that exact same Gutenberg text into FBReader and it displays much better. It seems that FBReader uses a little smarts when dealing with plain text files. So, it looks like converting text files is almost required on the Sony. Hmm, that's a question I'll have to ask over in the Cybook forum.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by jbenny

From your example, the Sony takes the text as-is and displays it. I just loaded up that exact same Gutenberg text into FBReader and it displays much better. It seems that FBReader uses a little smarts when dealing with plain text files. So, it looks like converting text files is almost required on the Sony. Hmm, that's a question I'll have to ask over in the Cybook forum.

Not fully justified either, is FBReader using the same line breaking than the Gutenberg file or can it automatically remove them ?