[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by kevin_boone

The PRS doesn't cope well with text documents that are formatted with hard line breaks -- and that's nearly all of them, so far as I can see. Unless, as you say, you have stripped the text out of some other format. Most of the Gutenberg texts, for example, are formatted for a fixed-width font display of 70-80 columns. Unless you actually install fixed-width fonts of the appropriate size on the reader (which I guess is possible), then you end up with all the line breaks in stupid places:

[...]
If you're converting from HTML or something with a specific paragraph divider, then all you have to is strip all the line breaks and put in a line break wherever there is a line-breaking or para-breaking tag -- that's easy enough.

If your text files have blank lines between paragraphs, then any2lrf will convert them to LRF files and correctly re-wrap the paragraphs.

But my point is that, unless you already have a large collection that is already in a format that the reader can read well, you're going to have to do some sort of conversion.

Which is where being a progammer comes in handy.
I've now a utility that will scan through my library and promote PalmDoc to Text, PDF to Text, Text to Html, Html to LRF or Html to ePub, combine series intoa single LRF or ePub and dump the final files into a directory I can import into calibre to load onto the 505.
That way I can keep my books in whatever format I already have them, and get them automatically progressed up to the right end format. I would have thought you could do some of this with calibre's library functions.
If you have just the Sony Library software, then I would agree that trying to manage any large or diverse library of books would be very difficult.

I don't disbelieve you -- but I do think that if you find the PRS navigation adequate with a very large collection, you're in the minority, and most likely a minority of one.

I've now got a system I can live with, where I use collections to indicate genre, then have a 'book' within that collection for each Author-Series combination, then a TOC in that 'book' to jump to the actual book in the series. I would certainly be happier if the 505 just let me browse folders on the memory card and pick books from there.