Sony Reader and SDHC cards

sfernald · 11-30-2006, 04:04 PM

Does anybody know if the Sony Reader supports SDHC cards or not?

I just placed an order for a new transcend 8GB card, but then forgot to check and now I can't find any info to verify that it will work. My rather new 4GB Patriot SD card works fine but I think that one is not SDHC.

Thanks.

NatCh · 11-30-2006, 04:34 PM

Hmm. I don't think anyone's commented on that yet, you may have to tell us how it works.

sfernald · 12-01-2006, 01:30 PM

I cancelled the order. Too much risk of it not working. Not even the wii supports SDHC, so i doubt the reader does.

Bob Russell · 12-01-2006, 03:14 PM

I don't think it would be a good idea to keep such a large set of books on a card anyway because of the time to index them all. I'm curious why it's so important to have the big storage. Are you trying to keep a whole Gutenberg or Blackmask DVD on it or something?

Most of us seem to have more internal storage than we need for books anyway. The SD card is useful to me just because it allows me to move books around without the Connect software.

sfernald · 12-01-2006, 03:31 PM

Yeah, exactly. I want my mom to have as much of the gutenberg/blackmask dvd as possible on the sd card.

My parents are not really that good with computers, so I want her to have enough to read for a lifetime just in case they never figure out how to load it up again, hehe.

I have a 4GB card myself and it is loaded to the brim. I think I have enough to read for 3 lifetimes (but my retired mom has more time to read of course). It is slow to index (about 10 minutes or so), but I've only had to reindex it twice: once when I added some purchased books through sony's connect software and the other when I popped out the sd card when the reader was off (BIG MISTAKE) to show a friend. It is a bit of a PITA to find the book I want when I have to go through 150+ pages of books, but it usually takes me a week or so to read a novel anyway.

I don't think I'll be adding books all that often any more. I probably won't hook it back up to the usb but one more time for the next 6 months (to purchase the remaining sci-fi short story compilations on the sony store - I just love short story sci-fi). Btw, I charge up about once every three weeks or so, depending on if I use it as a mp3 player when I'm at the gym.

take care.

NatCh · 12-01-2006, 03:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sfernald

I just love short story sci-fi.

Have you read The World Turned Upside Down? If not I suggest it.

You've probably already read some of the contents, of course, but they tried to get a good mix of pieces that weren't already anthologized out the wazoo.

You can get it as an RTF (no DRM at all to mess with) straight from Baen for $6, not a bad deal.

William Moates · 12-01-2006, 09:33 PM

Since the Reader has a flat file structure, a good question is "how many titles do you want on a memory card?" From what you say, sfernald, 1500 titles is too many, and I agree with you on that. I think the optimum size is between 100 and 200 titles, whoch is 10-20 pages in the Books menu. Multiply that by the average size of file, and that gives you the desired capacity of the card. If you're reading short stories, each story takes less than 100k, so that's 20-40 MB (at 200 titles). Manga, however, takes tens of MB per story, so a 1 GB memory card would hold less than 100 manga books. For that reason, 2 GB seems like a reasonable upper limit for memory cards.

(What can I say, I like doing ballpark calculations.

)

All of what I said will become moot when the Reader is upgraded to handle folders.

scottcstoness · 12-01-2006, 10:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by William Moates

Since the Reader has a flat file structure, a good question is "how many titles do you want on a memory card?" From what you say, sfernald, 1500 titles is too many, and I agree with you on that. I think the optimum size is between 100 and 200 titles, whoch is 10-20 pages in the Books menu. Multiply that by the average size of file, and that gives you the desired capacity of the card. If you're reading short stories, each story takes less than 100k, so that's 20-40 MB (at 200 titles). Manga, however, takes tens of MB per story, so a 1 GB memory card would hold less than 100 manga books. For that reason, 2 GB seems like a reasonable upper limit for memory cards.

(What can I say, I like doing ballpark calculations.

)

All of what I said will become moot when the Reader is upgraded to handle folders.

I've been using the 1GB Card for music and graphics files, and the internal memory for books. 90 MB is plenty for books (unless you don't want to attach the reader to your computer frequently).

I ripped a bunch of classical CDs, then used a freeware program to combine all the movements together into one track. So I only have 9 files for Beethoven's Symphonies, for example.

I also have a bunch of Escher grayscale images on the reader to show off the graphic capabilities; anything originally done in gray looks pretty sharp, and even some colour comics look OK on the machine (takes two movements of the joystick to read each page in landscape mode, though...)

Bob Russell · 12-01-2006, 10:52 PM

Warning... a couple of OT questions on things brought up...

Quote:

Originally Posted by scottcstoness

I ripped a bunch of classical CDs, then used a freeware program to combine all the movements together into one track. So I only have 9 files for Beethoven's Symphonies, for example.

What freeware did you use? Do you recommend it?

Quote:

Originally Posted by scottcstoness

I also have a bunch of Escher grayscale images on the reader to show off the graphic capabilities.

That's a great idea also. I think they would look cool on the Reader. Any suggested source for the pics?

NatCh · 12-02-2006, 12:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

Any suggested source for the pics?

Not to be a (total) smart aleck, but you might try here.

scottcstoness · 12-02-2006, 04:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

Warning... a couple of OT questions on things brought up...
What freeware did you use? Do you recommend it?That's a great idea also. I think they would look cool on the Reader. Any suggested source for the pics?

I'm using the "Free Audio Pack" that comes with "Free CD Ripper 1.4" from the following site:

http://koyotstar.free.fr/indexEn.html

It claims to be free of all spyware and to be freeware; I can't positively support that, but I haven't noticed anything, either. I was using it as a free CD Ripper to get .mp3 files, but it also has a rather nice tool called "Easy Audio Cutter", which seems to be a rather more full-featured audio editor than I need; however, if you open it up and select "File...Join", then it opens up a window in which you can add whatever tracks you want and then click a Join button, and it will give you a single track containing all the tracks selected.

Getting back to the Sony Reader, given the rather crappy music management in the reader (e.g. the strange sorting, the time it takes to page to the track you want), I've been pretty much just making .mp3s that are either a whole classical piece (e.g. Beethoven Symphony) or a whole CD. I've actually got one 165MB track on the Reader that is all 3 CDs of an "Intimate Moments" classical collection -- don't judge me, it has some nice excerpts and was cheap!

As for the Escher images, can't remember where I snagged mine, and there's already been an extremely helpful suggestion posted

Note that you either need to get a cup of coffee or pick up a paper book if you try to download a 165MB .mp3 file to the reader's SD card; really got to get me one of those USB 2.0 card-readers. On the bright side, adding 20 huge audio tracks didn't result in much of a delay when I unplugged the cable - the reader indexed 500-600 MB of music much more quickly than the 80 Escher pictures!

Cheers,

ScS

Edit: I just followed the link I posted, and apparently the Free CD Ripper is freeware, but the Audio Cutter is a fully functional free 30-day trial and $22 to buy; definitely worth the 30-day trial to slam together some large .mp3 tracks to ease the listening on the reader, I'll have to think about whether its worth paying for after that (and maybe play with some of the more advanced features...)

kahm · 12-02-2006, 02:14 PM

If you're looking for a good audio editor for simple things like combining files, take a look at Audacity.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Open source, runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOSX.

BobVA · 12-03-2006, 08:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NatCh

Have you read The World Turned Upside Down? If not I suggest it.

Thanks for the tip!

bbx · 11-27-2009, 09:07 PM

Well for all who might want to know. I have been usung a 8GB Micro SD with a SD adaptor with my PRS-505 all day with fine results. But since that time I found that I can't sort music, which is the reason i bought the chip. Oh well.

superstitious · 11-28-2009, 02:54 PM

I have used the 8 gb sdhc card( transcend class 6) on my 505. It seems to work fine even though I do not have a lot of content to even fill up even a quarter of the card, it took a while to download still. So since I don't have a lot of books save up yet I put them all in 505 itself but I am planning to use the card once I have acquire more books.

11-30-2006, 04:04 PM	#1
sfernald Zealot Posts: 102 Karma: 101 Join Date: Oct 2006	Sony Reader and SDHC cards Does anybody know if the Sony Reader supports SDHC cards or not? I just placed an order for a new transcend 8GB card, but then forgot to check and now I can't find any info to verify that it will work. My rather new 4GB Patriot SD card works fine but I think that one is not SDHC. Thanks.

12-01-2006, 03:31 PM	#5
sfernald Zealot Posts: 102 Karma: 101 Join Date: Oct 2006	Yeah, exactly. I want my mom to have as much of the gutenberg/blackmask dvd as possible on the sd card. My parents are not really that good with computers, so I want her to have enough to read for a lifetime just in case they never figure out how to load it up again, hehe. I have a 4GB card myself and it is loaded to the brim. I think I have enough to read for 3 lifetimes (but my retired mom has more time to read of course). It is slow to index (about 10 minutes or so), but I've only had to reindex it twice: once when I added some purchased books through sony's connect software and the other when I popped out the sd card when the reader was off (BIG MISTAKE) to show a friend. It is a bit of a PITA to find the book I want when I have to go through 150+ pages of books, but it usually takes me a week or so to read a novel anyway. I don't think I'll be adding books all that often any more. I probably won't hook it back up to the usb but one more time for the next 6 months (to purchase the remaining sci-fi short story compilations on the sony store - I just love short story sci-fi). Btw, I charge up about once every three weeks or so, depending on if I use it as a mp3 player when I'm at the gym. take care. Last edited by sfernald; 12-01-2006 at 03:35 PM.

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11-30-2006, 04:34 PM	#2
NatCh Gizmologist Posts: 11,615 Karma: 929550 Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Republic of Texas Embassy at Jackson, TN Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3	Hmm. I don't think anyone's commented on that yet, you may have to tell us how it works.

12-01-2006, 01:30 PM	#3
sfernald Zealot Posts: 102 Karma: 101 Join Date: Oct 2006	I cancelled the order. Too much risk of it not working. Not even the wii supports SDHC, so i doubt the reader does.

12-01-2006, 03:14 PM	#4
Bob Russell Recovering Gadget Addict Posts: 5,381 Karma: 676161 Join Date: May 2004 Location: Pittsburgh, PA Device: iPad	I don't think it would be a good idea to keep such a large set of books on a card anyway because of the time to index them all. I'm curious why it's so important to have the big storage. Are you trying to keep a whole Gutenberg or Blackmask DVD on it or something? Most of us seem to have more internal storage than we need for books anyway. The SD card is useful to me just because it allows me to move books around without the Connect software.

12-01-2006, 09:33 PM	#7
William Moates Zealot Posts: 107 Karma: 35 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Greensboro, NC Device: Sony Librie / Sony Clie / Sony Reader	Since the Reader has a flat file structure, a good question is "how many titles do you want on a memory card?" From what you say, sfernald, 1500 titles is too many, and I agree with you on that. I think the optimum size is between 100 and 200 titles, whoch is 10-20 pages in the Books menu. Multiply that by the average size of file, and that gives you the desired capacity of the card. If you're reading short stories, each story takes less than 100k, so that's 20-40 MB (at 200 titles). Manga, however, takes tens of MB per story, so a 1 GB memory card would hold less than 100 manga books. For that reason, 2 GB seems like a reasonable upper limit for memory cards. (What can I say, I like doing ballpark calculations. ) All of what I said will become moot when the Reader is upgraded to handle folders.

12-02-2006, 02:14 PM	#12
kahm Member Posts: 18 Karma: 54 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Edmonton, Alberta Device: 505/Librie/Zaurus/iPhone	If you're looking for a good audio editor for simple things like combining files, take a look at Audacity. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Open source, runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOSX.

11-27-2009, 09:07 PM	#14
bbx Junior Member Posts: 1 Karma: 12 Join Date: Nov 2009 Device: PRS-505	Well for all who might want to know. I have been usung a 8GB Micro SD with a SD adaptor with my PRS-505 all day with fine results. But since that time I found that I can't sort music, which is the reason i bought the chip. Oh well.

11-28-2009, 02:54 PM	#15
superstitious Addict Posts: 206 Karma: 7270 Join Date: Aug 2009 Device: K3 wifi	I have used the 8 gb sdhc card( transcend class 6) on my 505. It seems to work fine even though I do not have a lot of content to even fill up even a quarter of the card, it took a while to download still. So since I don't have a lot of books save up yet I put them all in 505 itself but I am planning to use the card once I have acquire more books.