The Extreme eBook, PRS505

[TedPark]

One of my specialties as a technology analyst is breaking things - or more specifically - researching their limits. This is a report on the results of my experiments with the PRS505.

I like the idea of a universal "library on a stick". I want to carry all the great works around with me at all times. To that end, I went through every reputable list I could find - Nobel, Pulitzer, Great Books, Western Classics, Everyman's Library, etc. and put together a master list of just over 2500 works of Classics, Fiction, and Non-fiction. I have been busy loading all of these I could find or create into my reader. At this point, my reader works well and contains the following. I have not exceeded any limits at this point and my reader rarely crashes or misbehaves. I do believe, however, that I have probably hit or exceeded practical limits of single-tier title and author lists. I certainly need the Author list better alphabetized - specifically as per the Author Reading attribute. In order to handle this much information I also need to be able to modify the metadata of LRX files. There is just no reason - and plain bad design - to have this info locked up.

My Sony Reader has original firmware, ~250MB of main memory, and both a SD Card and a Memory Stick at 2GB each.

I have loaded 1100 over files. The distribution is as follows:

Main Memory - 125 files - 175MB

Memory Stick - 104 files - 109 MB

SD Card - 894 files - 473 MB

The Main Memory contains primarily LRX files, including the 100 free classics from Sony. The memory stick contains mostly larger files like bibles, huge collections, Harvard classics, etc. The SD Card contains everything else. There really isn't any important rhyme or reason to this - it's just the way I did it to get some on each media. The Main Memory is probably as full as it should be. The other two have vast remaining resources.

I don't have any extensive graphic novels and no photos or slide shows. All of my files are basically "normal" books with text, and the occasional illustration. Across all my memory types, the average file is approximately 700KB.

For the SD Card, all these files are in one large flat directory. I have not yet tried to group them into folders to see if the operations are any different.

In terms of my master wish list - I have far more than 1100 titles. So many of my files have multiple "works" per file that the actual number of "library books" is greatly in excess of 1100. My current estimate is: 1500 works and over 500 authors.

I would also say that of the 1000 remaining works, at least 500 of them are terribly obscure. Of the remaining 500 that seem reasonable to acquire, well over half of them are modern enough to have copyrights in effect. So I will not be able to legally get them without some money changing hands.

Finally, my hope is that this report will inspire some additional bibliophiles with what is possible with these wonderful little devices.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by TedPark

My Sony Reader has original firmware, ~250MB of main memory, and both a SD Card and a Memory Stick at 2GB each.

I have loaded over files. The distribution is as follows:

Main Memory - 125 files - 175MB

Memory Stick - 104 files - 109 MB

SD Card - 894 files - 473 MB

Hmmm. What's the average file size? While my viewers support files in memory, and my device has 128MB, I prefer to keep all books on a card.

I have about 3,500 ebooks all told on my PDA, occupying about 1.7GB spread across two 2GB SD cards.

Most (about 3,200) are in Plucker format, converted from HTML. I use the High Compression option, which uses a Palm OS port of Zlib for gzip compatible compression . Compression averages about 70%. (If I didn't, the Plucker documents would fill a 2GB card entirely, and slop over onto another. The default Plucker document uses Palm DOC compatible RLE compression, for compression ratios of about 40%.)

I also have several hundred in Mobipocket format, using Mobi's default compression, which is equivalent to PalmDOC, and a scattering in eReader, PDF, and plain text format.

I roll my own Plucker documents, and use a naming convention of <Author's Initials> <series # (if the book is part of a series)> <Title>, and set the default sort to Filename. Plucker doesn't support nested directories (though it's been discussed on the Plucker dev list), so Palm OS categories are used to breakdown by general topic. For Mobi, I'm at the mercy of the name used when the file was created. though Mobi offers Reading Lists that work like categories so I can control which books get shown in a listing.

The PDF viewer and the plain text viewer both support nested firectories, so I can use those for categorization.

File size varies widely here. I'd guess the average at about 300KB, but I have Plucker volumes as large as 15MB. (Big books, with lots of embedded color illustrations.)
______
Dennis

[acidzebra]

I love the idea of library on a stick and when I bought the Sony I intended to do just that - carry a lifetime's worth of books with me. However, the way the Sony works quickly cured me of that idea - at least until someone writes a universal file manager which "hides" books from the Sony until called forth.

I don't think the distribution of the files matter all that much, but I carry around 700 titles, all in LRF format. I find that a greater number than that will drastically impact both the amount of time you have to wait after a full shutdown/device sync (when it rebuilds its internal database of books) and the operation of the device it self (with regards to clicking through menus and adding bookmarks for instance).

At 1500 books loaded I was at times waiting 10-15 minutes before it had rebuilt its internal database and after hitting the bookmark button and pressing menu thrice it was sitting there for something like 10-15 seconds before the bookmark indicator appeared and it jumped up three levels to the main menu.

You can test this yourself quite easily, remove both memory sticks, wait for the Sony to update its database, and then click around for a bit - you should notice a definite speed increase.