New member, Old sony 500- help

[daredevil22r]

Hello everybody,
I just bought the sony 500 a few days ago on craigslist for a cheap price. It seem sto work good.
What can I do to make sure everything is running the way it's supposed to? also, are there any improvement hacks out there? Since I'm sure it's a first generation reader, there has to be ways to improve on it.
Thanks in advance. Hope I can learn alot from this club. I really need to read more and this will help.

[slayda]

Welcome to the forum. Yes there are hacks here on MobileRead. I'll check where and edit this post with a link later. The best ones IMO are the clock and the delete ebook. Also check out bookDesigner & Calibre softwares that you can use to reformat ebooks (if they do not have DRM) for use on the PRS-500. You can find them on the MR WIKI or see links below.

One thing you should know, if you let the 500 discharge completely you will need to use the AC/DC charger since the USB won't charge it if it is completely dead. If the battery isn't completely dead you can recharge from your computer via USB.

You should be able to register it with Sony and purchase books from them or you can also find appropriately formatted books at Baen or Fictionwise's multiformat & probably other places too.

Good luck.

BookDesigner
Calibre

[daredevil22r]

Thanks. I just put a pdf book on the reader and the text is really tiny! Is there a way to format itso that it doesn't show tiny text? or am I going to have to save it as a text and then format it to a reader file? Would I loose the pictures?

[MickeyC]

Hi daredevil22r and welcome to the Forum. I have a 505 and there is a button on the lower left side that increases the text size. Don't know if the 500 has that feature or not.

[daredevil22r]

Yes it does. it's about 1/4 of the way down on the left side. I've used it, but it only zooms in a little. The text is very faint and eventhough I can still read it, it strains my eyes.
The reader had a few books in it and thet look very good. I am excited to have gotten it in very good condition for $100. It came with charger, usb cable, and cd. I can't wait to install a clock in it. Hope I don't mess anything up.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by daredevil22r

What can I do to make sure everything is running the way it's supposed to? also, are there any improvement hacks out there? Since I'm sure it's a first generation reader, there has to be ways to improve on it.
Thanks in advance. Hope I can learn alot from this club. I really need to read more and this will help.

Welcome daredevil22r

For THE hack see Hack Builder at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...t=hack+builder .
Hack called "delete books" can cause problems if you delete a book that is a part of the collection. You can create collection using only the original Sony Library program.

Download program called bookdesigner.

Look for software called calibre - it is vastly better than the original sony Library program.
You can use it to manage and convert your books and for loading the books to your Reader. Even on Mac or Linux (unlike that sorry excuse for a software called Sony library)

Also see our wiki for tips for conversion software, places to get and buy books, ...

Look at the link at the top of this very page called E-Books. Our members have contributed many thousands lovingly formated e-books. Most of them Project Gutemberg stuff and other legally available books.
Download some books (look for BBeB or lrf or lrs files - those are native to Sony Reader) and load them into your reader using cable and Sony software. Unlike the newer models you will not see your connected reader as an USB disk.
Also try downloading or creating some rtf files and load them up. You can find many free SciFi books in rtf format (and many other DRM-free formats) on www.baen.com in their free library. They sell the books and the free library is to hook you up. Beware! Very addictive stuff! ;-)
Try pdf file. Create one formatted for page 90x120mm. A4 pdf files are almost unusable. You can embed the fonts to pdf file to display non-english texts.
Repeat the process using card reader and SD card. PRS500 only recognizes files on cards up to 2GB (or something like that - try looking at the old threads).
Repeat the process using Memory stick card.
Do not put too many books at the card. No more that several hundred. When you insert a card with more than thousand books the reader becomes *very* unresponsive.

Be aware that if you load the file to the reader using SD card or memory stick the reader has to look through the files and catalog them. It can take loooong time. Many minutes. That is normal. Also when you open a file that was transferred to the reader using the card the reader has to paginate the file and that can take a long time. Next time when you open the book it will be very fast.

The reader should work on a single charge several weeks or many thousands pages (or combination of those two). Loading a card with many books or opening many freshly loaded books (repaginating) eats battery quickly.

When the battery is completely drained you can not charge it using usb cable you have to use charger. You can only charge the reader using the USB cable if the computer has installed the Sony Library Software. I know. That is very stupid.


... and one more thing ...
Come here (to the Mobileread forum) often

[kacir]

Originally Posted by daredevil22r

The text is very faint and eventhough I can still read it, it strains my eyes.

That is because the pdf is NOT an e-book format. It is format for printing out the *exact layout* of a page. Most often it is A4 or letter sized page. With pdf file the zoom button will not help you. If you take a copier (Xerox) and make a copy of an A4 sized page so it would fit on a space 90x120mm (size of the Reader screen) it will be nearly unreadable as well.

Create a pdf file for page size 90x120mm.

Or, better yet, create an rtf file
Arial (or Helvetica font) size 16 points, no page margins, left justification, first line indentation 5mm, space after paragraph 2 points.
Load it up try various zoom levels.
EXPERIMENT with different sizes, margins, fonts (Times New Roman, for example), different justification.
Once you find THE perfect layout create a macro in a word processing program (such as OpenOffice.org writer or MSWord or other) so you can format your text with a pres of a button.
With rtf file the reader will use one of its three built-in fonts (sans serif, serif and monospaced) Those fonts are heavily hinted and look best on the e-ink screens.

[daredevil22r]

Thanks. By creating the trf file, would I be able to somehow copy the pdf's? I was reading online that I should convert the pdf's to text files, and then convert that to the sony reader format. Seems long and complicated, but I managed to do 1 book so far. It looks good, but it does take time, and there are no chapter index to jump to.
I will be here more often now that I found a place that'll help.

[slayda]

My recommendation is to stay away from PDFs unless they have been especially formatted for the reader. They are usually a lot of work to convert.

[daredevil22r]

The rason I ask about the pdf's is that I have quite a few books in that format that I would just hate having to pay for since I already own them. I don't mind converting them. It is that you are correct, it takes too much time and it doesn't seem to be worth it. I don't get images, just the text.

[daredevil22r]

WOW! I am excited! I followed Bob Rusell's thread on the clock and joy stick, plus igorsk's universal flash hack and it all worked perfectly!
Thanks for the advice.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by daredevil22r

The rason I ask about the pdf's is that I have quite a few books in that format that I would just hate having to pay for since I already own them. I don't mind converting them. It is that you are correct, it takes too much time and it doesn't seem to be worth it. I don't get images, just the text.

I just feed the pdf file through an OCR program "Readiris Pro for Hewlett Packard" that came with a cheap printer/scanner/fax combo from HP.
It can process pdf files containing bitmaps AND pdf files containing text. It deploys the same clever algorithms to identify columns of text, pictures, graphs, tables, paragraphs, ... with the "vector + font + text" pdf files as with bitmap files. The results are great.

Before i discovered that Readiris can process pdf files directly I ws creating bitmaps from pdf file by using GsView program and then I ran the resulting bitmaps through a VERY old version of Recognita OCR program (version 1.something! (FIFTEEN years old!)), that came with semi-proffesional scanner UMAX.
GsView is just a graphical front-end for Ghostscript.

[daredevil22r]

KACIR, can you explain it to me clearly? I am not computer lingo savvy. Would the pdf files in the reader have the tiny font? Or would it look bigger like all the other ebooks on this site?

[kacir]

Originally Posted by daredevil22r

KACIR, can you explain it to me clearly? I am not computer lingo savvy. Would the pdf files in the reader have the tiny font? Or would it look bigger like all the other ebooks on this site?

Pdf file that has tiny font when you open it on the reader will always have tiny fonts. You can not help it.

What you CAN do, is converting pdf files to rtf files.
pdf files can not reflow lines of text.

When you read RTF file on the reader and you increase the font size (by pressing Size button) the characters that do not fit no the line "flow" to the next line. So instead of a paragraph that had 2 lines in tiny font you have 3 lines using medium font or 4 lines using big one.

What I am suggesting is that you take your book in pdf file and convert it into rtf format. If the font is too small in rtf file you can use zoom on the reader and if that is not enough you can open rtf file in OpenOffice.org writer or MSWord or even Windows Write (that is a standard part of Windows) and change the size of the font.

Unfortunately, converting a pdf file into rtf is difficult and complicated and time consuming. One possibility for conversion is to use the above mentioned OCR program.