Quote:
Originally Posted by Trono
I'm definitely one of those people (showing lack of familiarity, I mean..) - thought I'd be able to read my "palm-books" previously bought from eReader (DRM'd), but they are sadly not recognized with this firmware either.
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I wasn't referring to end users who really shouldn't need to know any of this stuff. I think the fault lies with vendors and marketing - who should know better.
.pdb files date from the early days of Palm. Palm had a very rudimentary filesystem in which "applications" used the extension .prc while the data related to these "applications" was contained in files with the .pdb extension.
So .pdb (Palm database) actually refers to almost any data file on the Palm and can contain almost anything. For example, the Palm Address Book "application" is contained in a .prc file and it manipulates .pdb files with address book data inside them, but .pdb files for other applications can include saved game and game level data, memos, drawings, plucker documents, converted PDF documents, settings information, database contents and so on.
.pdb files that actually contain PalmDOC data are a very small proportion of all the .pdb files in use. The problem for me is that I use Plucker files extensively on the V3, and these also have the .pdb extension. This is appropriate in the Palm environment, where applications know which files belong to them from metadata associated with each file, but difficult once you move out of that environment.
It looks silly in retrospect, but nobody ever thought that the Palm would evolve into anything more than a very low powered organiser, let alone that Palm type documents would ever be used on other devices. There's a lesson to be learned here I think.
Of course, the issues around DRM are another whole can of worms.