[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by veshman

1. I primarily use a Mac, although I could use VMWare Fusion if I have to (but I prefer staying in the OS X environment).

If you do not need or want to use Collections, then you are good to go as the 505 shows up as a mass storage device and you can put your content on that way. But you will need a TRUE windows system to do any fuirmware upgrades. An emulated Windows on a MAC can bork the reader.

2. I read a lot of full page PDFs. Is the best way to read these in landscape mode? Or is there a way to convert them that is a little more friendly to the Reader?

You can use pdflrf. I think there's a Linux version and the Windows version. Don't think there is an OS X version at present.

3. A lot of the stuff I want to read is derived from the web, for example, maybe some articles from The Atlantic.com or other sources. What would be the best way to get them into a format that would be good for the 505 Reader (PDF, PDF with custom paper size, HTML, cut and paste into a text file, something else?).

What will work on a MAC with OS X (and very well too) is libprs500. It will do html2lrf and your content will them be in LRF which the reader will handle fine.

4. Managing the books: This is probably the most challenging thing to do on the Sony, since it doesn't seem to recognize folder structure....so I'm not sure what the best way is to keep the different texts organized? Is this something I can do on the Mac, or do I need to use the Sony software? If I have lot of articles about a certain topic, I'd like to keep them together so I can find them easily on the Reader. Would the iRex be a better choice in this regard (it also has the benefit of marking up the documents which would be very useful, but not sure that it's worth an additional $400!).

The 505 has what is called Collections. There are like directories off of the root with no subdirectories. The way to manage them is to use Ebook Reader. Not sure if Libprs500 is handling Collections on OS X at the moment.

5. A lot of PDFs have titles and names in the metadata that are not meaningful on the Sony reader. What's the best way to handle this since it doesn't seem to work off the filename?

There are programs out there to edit the metadata of PDF. You'll have to either search Google or the forum (one was mention not too long ago here). The metadata is not correct and what you are seeing to that problem.

I know that some of these questions have been answered in different parts of the forum, but I can't tell what "best practice" is for each of the above.

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm excited to be part of the Reader community!

Best regards,

Bhavesh

Glad to have you aboard. One thing those... please don't use the term eReader unless you are referring to eReader books or the eReader software. eReader is a format not available on any eink devices. All it can do is confuse things.