hi mtr, welcome ! you'll find a lot of sony lovers here, it's really a great device. congratulations on joining the ebook-lovers horde !
i can't help you with the firmware but take a look in the sony forum, you might find the answer to your question there, if you don't, please feel free to start a new thread to ask about it !
as for editing your books, for epub books i recommend you take a look at the excellent, open source, FREE epub editor called sigil which is developped by one of our very own genius developpers, Valloric. it has its own dedicated forum here where you can find hints and tips. it's still in alpha stage but already up to the third version and quite brilliant. for the moment, it's biggest shortcoming is that search and replace is not yet implemented ; personally, to get around this, i open an epub in sigil, copy the entire code window (ctrl A, ctrl C) then paste (ctrl V) into notepad or any text editor, do all my search / replace there, then copy the whole thing back into sigil.
it's a lot easier if you know a bit of html / css code and syntax but that's easy enough to learn, and sigil does have a wysiwyg view which is helpful if you're not too familiar with the code yet.
lit is probably best fixed by converting it to epub first (try calibre, another great free app for library management and conversion, also developped by a local hero, it's got its own forum too, or else use convertLit to "explode" it into html and then import those files into sigil). lrf is a lot harder to edit, i recommend you stick to epub if you can at all.
take a look around the forum and don't hesitate to join in the discussion, you'll find people here are friendly and helpful (and very passionate about ebooks !).
