Questions for Jetbook owners

[DJHARKAVY]

Originally Posted by DebbyS

Thank you for easing my mind! I realized I could simply try it and see if it works , then report back here my results... so I'll do that. I failed earlier to note that when I said "big", I mean in the realm of, oh, 120 MB (thus I chuckle a bit when you report a 23MB book... I'm thinking, only 23MB!). Last night I even made a special effort to save The Bourne Supremacy in three parts, trying to make the book smaller (in a sense), but they came out to 72 megabytes each...! I know the "problem" is the way I'm scanning them (high res) and the way I'm saving them (original, medium quality), they have no choice but to be large... but if I ever have worsening eye problems and need to project such a book on a bigger screen, I'll have no trouble reading it! Hmm, maybe I should resave it smaller as a test, have two versions... and report those results, too, for others who scan...

If you use a good OCR program with those scans, you should get a fairly good text copy which can then be adjusted to whatever size you want.

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by DJHARKAVY

If you use a good OCR program with those scans, you should get a fairly good text copy which can then be adjusted to whatever size you want.

That should certainly be the case, and work fine for text based ebooks, like
the novel mentioned. I am somewhat surprised that anyone would expend
the effort to scan a book that is already available in electronic format.

The PDF format has many advantages for -complex- document creation,
with interactive features - not what works best for simple text novels.

With less than the effort to scan a large novel, you should be able to fine
tune the OCR process so that you are able to create text files with only a
few, easily corrected errors.

After spending the time and effort to do the scanning, the OCR and quality
control process should be a minor part of the overall process. Many
misscanned words would be caught by a spellchecker, for example.

Luck;
Ken

P.S.; Try Inkmesh.com and you will find most of the Bourne Series for between
$10 and $12, at various retailers.

[DebbyS]

I'll check out Inkmesh.com, sounds like a good place. I gave myself permission to dismantle my books only a month or so ago; I wish I'd done so a lot earlier (I'd be way ahead!). I'd love to have OCR'd versions, but I basically wanted to get them in a portable format asap in case I might for any reason have to pick up an leave. I wouldn't feel so bad leaving behind books and comic books and music and such if I already have them saved back to thumbdrives At the time I started the project, I figured I could read the PDFs on my netbook, and I still can, particularly the comics. It was only a week ago I decided to get the JBL. So the PDFing idea came first, then the thought to get an inexpensive reader.

I experimentally pulled a short home-made PDF into Paperport (my interface program) and I was able to play with it the converted PDF, so that tells me that I'll probably be able to OCR such documents someday if I ever need to. I'll need a lot of time to convert the really big Ludlum books (and they're all big...) so I may wind up buying them (my time is valuable, too). However, I now have several PDF'd Ludlum books on my SD card and they look pretty good on the JBL

I also decided to see how the JBL works with my computer, so following instructions I made sure both were on, used the supplied cord (I must have a half dozen of them around here from other devices), my computer (Window XP) recognized the device, said "go for it!" and then I explored the memory of the JBL. I copied all the books over, then went back into the JBL and deleted things that don't interest me (like the NY City driving manual... what??? Bizarre...most of the poetry and Shakespeare and Doyle). Some of the old classics rather interest me, so I left them on for now. That was all very easy. I note that all the names of the documents, while not entirely visible on the screen, are easy to figure out. There were txt, fb2 and rtf as well as pdfs. I've named my home-made ones like "Ludlum, Robert, 1980, The Bourne Identity" for example (without quote marks) and that shows up just fine.

i can say with confidence "so far, so good!" I have the coming week off and plan to do a little bus riding around town, so if the weather is good, I may take the JBL with me Then again, we can sure use the rain!

Thanks again for all your help!

[Ken Maltby]

One thing you can do, to see more of the titles, is to cycle through the "Font/Size"
Button to a smaller font for the "eBooks" menu folders and files listings.

Luck;
Ken

[DebbyS]

A quick update: Since I still have the books, I have been OCRing my scans lately instead of saving them as PDFs. The translations are coming out pretty good, but I still have to check them -- while trying to not also read them (saving that for later!). RTF is a better format than PDF for reading, but if one is in a big hurry, PDFing is better... I may resort to buying the books I don't have time to scan. I tried to buy something from B&N, but they didn't believe me when I put in my password (which I had written down so I knew it was right)... so next time I'll try a more friendly site like those you all have mentioned, one that simply needs my credit card #. On the JBL front, this morning I put all the books that came with the JBL in one folder so I can more easily look at the folders with material I want to see first. I also just bought an 8gig SanDisk card at Staples, where it was on sale and I also had a 20% off coupon. Now to fill it up

[Ken Maltby]

I find the B&N DRM to be the easiest to deal with, actually. There is one thing you need
to keep in mind with the unlocking data (Your name and CC#) and the JBL's implementation
of the Adobe Reader, for some reason you can't have any spaces in the unlocking data.
For the Secure eReader DRM, which works the same, you can have spaces.

If you enter your name without spaces, or other punctuation, your B&N DRM infected
books should be unlocked and all subsequent ebooks that use the same unlocking data
will open without you having to enter the unlocking data.

Luck;
Ken