Comparison between Librie and Sony Reader from LibrieGuy

[hkabir]

I found some comparison between Librie and Sony Reader on Yahoo Libire group . Librie Guy who did some really good hacking with Librie have presented some insights on formatting issues, file structures, PDFs, fonts, and Librie softwares etc. on Sony Reader. Let me quote his analysis:

My original assumption that Reader and LIBRIe use same file
structure on a memory stick was, apparently, wrong. It looks like
the Reader merely scans the whole file system on the stick and picks
up all of the files it recognizes as books, regardless of the
folders they are in. Therefore, there may be no need for tools like
BookListGen because you can just drop a file to your memory stick
and be done with it.

I played with formats for a while, and the below is what I came up
with:

RTF. At this point I am not sure whether RTF supports embedded fonts
and whether they can be displayed in Reader. My Reader displays RTF
using built-in fonts only.
A few things I noticed so far:
- Non-English Unicode characters (Cyrillic, Asian, etc.) are not
displayed properly. They get substituted with European accented
characters, like if the text was not Unicode, but single-byte.
- Embedded pictures do NOT show up.
- Page formatting is completely ignored, as well as headers and
footers.
- Only explicit page breaks are supported. Those that are part of
styles (say, a break before a chapter header style) are ignored.
- Font size really matters. I think acceptable size for text is 16
pt and up.
- Horizontal font scaling is ignored.
- Paragraph alignment supported: left, right, centered, justified
- Underlined, strikethrough, subscript, superscript formats are
supported
- Double-strikethrough, small caps or all caps are NOT supported

PDF. Works ok, but zooming seems inconsistent. If you are up for
good-looking books, or just non-English books, PDF, probably, would
remain your best bet. Assuming you have an appropriate editor and
converting tools, you can really do wonders: format just the way you
want, embed fonts, pictures, etc. Just a few things to have in mind:
keep your page size small relatively to your font size, so it would
fit 20-25 lines of text only; avoid using colors for text --
anything but black will display in a lighter shade (unless that's
what you really want). As expected, most regular PDFs (8.5x11 or A4)
are barely readable or even completely unreadable on a Reader.

I also noticed some differences in how LIBRIe and Reader render
fonts. When the font size is small, LIBRIe tends to keep it bold, so
it remains black on the screen. Reader, on the other hand, just
merely downscales the font, meaning that the smaller the fonts is,
the lighter it is on the screen.

In addition, I tried to load books, created with Printer for Librie.
On a LIBRIe, they look fine -- each page consist of a black-and-
white 600x800 image, which fits perfectly in the 600x800 screen,
pixel to pixel. The Reader, however, tends to slightly reduce the
display area when displaying BBeB files, making Printer for LIBRIe
files look "damaged" on screen.

-librie guy

[TadW]

Just a few things to have in mind:
keep your page size small relatively to your font size, so it would fit 20-25 lines of text only; avoid using colors for text -- anything but black will display in a lighter shade (unless that's what you really want). As expected, most regular PDFs (8.5x11 or A4) are barely readable or even completely unreadable on a Reader

Thanks for the recommendations.