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Old 10-16-2009, 05:29 AM   #1
Panther_Modern
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Exclamation PSA: PRS-600 will hang when attempting to read database of PRS-700

Hello everyone,

Long time lurker, first time poster. Thanks to everyone for their invaluable threads so far in helping me determine which ebook reader(s!) to get.

I was the previous owner of a PRS-700 which I loved, and when the PRS-600 came out, I sold my PRS-700 to a co-worker for $200 and upgraded to the PRS-600.

A small "gotcha" I found when transitioning over;

I have a 4GB SD card with 80 PDF ebooks that I was using in my PRS-700, and it of course has the book & note database(s) created by the PRS-700 - I found that when inserting the SD card with that database intact, the PRS-600 would hang, and I would have to reset it by sliding the power switch three times.

I put the SD card in my laptop, deleted the database(s) created by the PRS-700 and inserted the card back in the PRS-600 - the reader nearly instantly parsed the 80 books and delivered me to the home screen. I am fairly confident that the PRS-600 will not properly read some - if not all - portions of the .xml databases created by the PRS-700, and this may be true for other models.

I will attempt to do some more exhaustive testing after work tonight, where I will load single PDFs on another SD card, insert it into the PRS-700, allow it to build the database, and then transfer that card to the PRS-600. If it doesn't hang, I'm going to say it is possibly the size of the database or entries in it that are incompatible.

For reference, I left the PRS-600 alone for over 30 minutes when it first appeared to "lock up" when reading the SD card with the database(s) from the PRS-700 on it, in the hopes that it was just taking a long time. That appeared not to be the case, as it did respond to a reset (flip the power switch three times).

I'll post more information as I do some testing.

On a lighter note;

I *LOVE* my PRS-600. It's about 20% lighter and 20% thinner than the PRS-700, and I can now annotate PDFs and other books with _handwriting!_ Woo! I can't express how much I love that feature.

Upon the recommendations of others from this forum, I purchased the M-Edge executive leather jacket for the PRS-505, and it fits the 600 perfectly. I also tried the jacket from my PRS-700, and it also works. The 505 jacket is much more - almost too much - snug, however.

If anyone has any questions about how well it reads PDFs or other documents, I'll be happy to answer them, but it looks like everyone else has already covered this information pretty comprehensively.

Cheers!
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Old 10-16-2009, 09:11 AM   #2
FragFrog
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In my (limited) experience the PRS-600 will lock up if the internal database is corrupted. Strangely enough, the exact same thing happens with the eBook Library software on my PC, which crashes if I connect a PRS-600 with said broken internal database.

At one point manually removing a few books from the database caused my PRS-600 to lock up instantly upon start. I proceeded to connect it to the PC whereupon it did get into USB mode fine, but then EBL crashed everytime I tried to start it. After manually removing everything on the readers memory and restarting the PRS-600 it booted normally again and EBL stopped crashing.

Why the software has no way to either fix DB problems or at the very least rebuild the DB index is beyond me - it seems a blatantly obvious feature in a device such as this, instead crashing the software is possibly the worst way to handle it. Luckily Calibre seems less picky about these things
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Old 10-16-2009, 12:36 PM   #3
Panther_Modern
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Well, the tests I just did confirm the above.

The PRS-600 does not read the database(s) generated by the PRS-700, regardless of size. Even if the database contains only a single PDF on the card, the PRS-600 still won't read it.

I can say I'm somewhat surprised about that...I expected the readers to share more or less the same functionality. After careful consideration however, I see that's not the case; the "handwriting" notes add different values to the "notes" fields in the database.

For example, if you annotate a document in "Small" text mode, and then enlarge to "Medium" text mode, the annotation will disappear. Similarly, if you annotate at "Large" and go back to "Medium", the handwritten note will disappear - however, returning to each zoom level views each note, respectively.

Since the PRS-700 doesn't have this feature and doesn't include entries in the database(s) for such handwritten notes, I suspect that a combination of fields probably not limited to the hand-written notes fields are what is throwing it off.

Regardless, it's definitely not a deal-breaker, although Sony should probably put a small warning together, as people will undoubtedly transfer their SD or MemoryStick cards over to their new device.
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Old 10-16-2009, 01:04 PM   #4
JSWolf
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The thing you should never ever do is manually delete any books that are in a collection. This is a sure way to cause a problem. Use the delete book option of the Reader itself.
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Old 10-16-2009, 01:08 PM   #5
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I'm speaking of the database itself...not the books listed in it.
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