Question about Sony Connect

[Stonecoldcrb]

Gotcha, thanks for being so helpful folks. I will def. check out those sites you suggested NatCh.

Do you guys favor one format over another for the PRS500? especially in terms of readily available content, and ease of getting the files to the reader itself? and/or those files that really dont have to be converted?

Additionally I should add.......I have a large number of books in PDF format that I want to take advantage of, and I am looking for a foolproof way to get them on the reader. I understand from what I've read here so far, that these particular files need to be converted to some other format?

In the end the selfish side of me wants the easiest route poss. to enjoy the most books on the reader with little fanfare. I learned a good saying when I was being taught how to surf.....one of the authorities on surfing taught "easy is good".

Know what I mean.

[NatCh]

Hey, being helpful is just one of the many services we offer around here.

What format you favor depends on what you're wanting. You can use RTF files straight off your hard-drive, if you don't mind them not displaying pix. You might want to bump the font size to ~16 points, as the RTF engine seems to display them a bit on the small side. Word or Wordpad (to name the most obvious ones) will do that for you in a snap. (ctrl+a to select the entire text and ctrl+shift+> to increase the font size of everything in steps).

Using something like BookDesigner to make LRF files (Sony's BBeB format, that is) has a lot of following for files that are meant to be used/read repeatedly. It has the advantages of displaying inline pix, as well as being about 2/3 the size of the same file in RTF.

PDF files really don't work well unless the 'page size' that they're created with is pretty close to the display size of the Reader -- it scales the pages to the Reader's screen size and A4/letter pages are usually all but completely unreadable that way.

There are a number of apps discussed around the forum for slicing and dicing PDFs to make them fit well on the screen, and for extracting the text from the PDF to a more ... flexible format.

The real problem with PDF is that it isn't a book format, it's a page layout format. It's designed specifically for the purpose of making sure a document prints exactly the same for you as it does for me, even if it goes around the planet several times in getting from one to the other. The only reason that people have tried to use it for books is that Adobe brilliantly offered its PDF reader app to the whole solar-system for free, which pretty much means that anyone anywhrere can open the files. Unfortunately, they also named it "Acrobat Reader" which makes book people think that it's good for reading stuff in, which isn't exactly the same in a book context.

It's possible that Adobe's Digital Editions will help with that situation, but we'll have to see what they end up doing.

I agree that easy is good if it gets you the same results as difficult. But sometimes easy is just easy, and it gets you something you don't like, where a bit less easy would get you something you love.

Unfortunately, due to the effect we call 'the tower of e-babel,' there are about two dozen significant e-book formats out there (and about three score less significant ones), which makes it difficult sometimes to even tell which file will work with what reader. Not a good or easy situation, but until a 'standard' e-book format is accepted by the world at large, it's one we pretty much have to deal with if we want to e-read.

[Stonecoldcrb]

Thanks a ton Nat........

and a nicely put reply you posted up. I will continue to mess around with things. Course it'll be easier when I actually get the reader delivery this coming week. I will go back to the Sony site and check to see what formats are acceptable for the device, then I will work myself into frustration with it all.........lol.

In the end I may just be able to read a book or two.

[HarryT]

The formats that the Reader accepts are:

- Plain text
- RTF (but pictures don't show up on the Reader)
- Word Doc (automatically converted to RTF when loaded)
- PDF (but see the restrictions noted in earlier messages)
- LRF (the Reader's native format, and by far the most flexibe)

RTF is fine for stuff that you're going to read once and then throw away. Stuff that's a "keeper" it's well worthwhile taking the time to use a tool like "Book Designer" to convert to LRF. That way you get support for pictures, a table of contents, etc.

[dhbailey]

It's important to note, though that the Reader will only import Word Doc files IF you happen to have Word installed on your computer so that Connect can call on it to convert to RTF.

For those of us who choose not to use Microsoft Word, even if we download or otherwise have a Word Doc file on our computer, need to do the conversion to RTF manually, using our word processor.

[HarryT]

Good point - Word is so ubiquitous that it's sometimes easy to overlook the fact that not everybody has it.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by dhbailey

It's important to note, though that the Reader will only import Word Doc files IF you happen to have Word installed on your computer so that Connect can call on it to convert to RTF.

For those of us who choose not to use Microsoft Word, even if we download or otherwise have a Word Doc file on our computer, need to do the conversion to RTF manually, using our word processor.

Even that isn't enough! You also have to have a Windows PC so you can install the Connect software. If, for example, you have a Mac with a copy of Word you are S.O.L. -- Sony doesn't provide the Connect software on any platform other than Windows.

Of course, based on my experience with it at my sister's place over the Xmas holidays, you well might not want to have the Connect software in any case. The libprs500 library is almost as good, and is improving steadily. And it runs on Mac and Linux as well as Windows.