[TedPark]

One of my specialties as a technology analyst is breaking things - or more specifically - researching their limits. This is a report on the results of my experiments with the PRS505.

I like the idea of a universal "library on a stick". I want to carry all the great works around with me at all times. To that end, I went through every reputable list I could find - Nobel, Pulitzer, Great Books, Western Classics, Everyman's Library, etc. and put together a master list of just over 2500 works of Classics, Fiction, and Non-fiction. I have been busy loading all of these I could find or create into my reader. At this point, my reader works well and contains the following. I have not exceeded any limits at this point and my reader rarely crashes or misbehaves. I do believe, however, that I have probably hit or exceeded practical limits of single-tier title and author lists. I certainly need the Author list better alphabetized - specifically as per the Author Reading attribute. In order to handle this much information I also need to be able to modify the metadata of LRX files. There is just no reason - and plain bad design - to have this info locked up.

My Sony Reader has original firmware, ~250MB of main memory, and both a SD Card and a Memory Stick at 2GB each.

I have loaded 1100 over files. The distribution is as follows:

Main Memory - 125 files - 175MB

Memory Stick - 104 files - 109 MB

SD Card - 894 files - 473 MB

The Main Memory contains primarily LRX files, including the 100 free classics from Sony. The memory stick contains mostly larger files like bibles, huge collections, Harvard classics, etc. The SD Card contains everything else. There really isn't any important rhyme or reason to this - it's just the way I did it to get some on each media. The Main Memory is probably as full as it should be. The other two have vast remaining resources.

I don't have any extensive graphic novels and no photos or slide shows. All of my files are basically "normal" books with text, and the occasional illustration. Across all my memory types, the average file is approximately 700KB.

For the SD Card, all these files are in one large flat directory. I have not yet tried to group them into folders to see if the operations are any different.

In terms of my master wish list - I have far more than 1100 titles. So many of my files have multiple "works" per file that the actual number of "library books" is greatly in excess of 1100. My current estimate is: 1500 works and over 500 authors.

I would also say that of the 1000 remaining works, at least 500 of them are terribly obscure. Of the remaining 500 that seem reasonable to acquire, well over half of them are modern enough to have copyrights in effect. So I will not be able to legally get them without some money changing hands.

Finally, my hope is that this report will inspire some additional bibliophiles with what is possible with these wonderful little devices.