I'll try to help on the questions that I know the answers to.
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Originally Posted by ziegl027
1) PDF files—I’ve seen some info suggesting the Sony does these quite acceptably. Others say it sucks. Still others say it’s fine if you manipulate the file in some way to optimize it. I do not now how to do this and have minimal interest in learning how. Most of what I will be reading is from sources like this. If anybody could give me a screen shot (this page links to a free content edition of the journal, so I don’t THINK copyright is an issue), I would be deeply grateful. Even better would be a few different ones (portrait vs. landscape, different magnifications, etc). Image display isn’t as important as you might think as long as the text displays in a readable fashion. |
I have a 505, but if you like I will try and do this for you later. Sony does some PDFs great, others terrible. It depends entirely upon the PDF.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ziegl027
4) File organization—again, largely PDF files, not books. Once I have an article on there, I need to be able to find it again. Ideally, I would want to file it under many different categories (e.g. “MRI”, “Equine Orthopedics”, “November Journal Club”). Subfolders would be great but I can survive without them.
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My answer is based on the Sony Reader:
I highly recommend that you download and use
calibre. It was created by one of our members and it is far superior to Sony's software. Calibre will allow you to add tags to each file. When those files go on your reader they will show up in collections based on the tags. For example, a file with the tag "Equine Orthopedics" and "MRI" will show up in collections labeled "Equine Orthopedics" and "MRI". I don't think there's a limit to the number of tags you can put on a file.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ziegl027
5) Bookmarks—can you bookmark files (not books)? Can you have more than one bookmark in a file or is it strictly a means of getting back to the last page you were on?
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Again, on a Sony, you can put as many bookmarks as you like in a file. The Reader "sees" everything as a book - it treats every file type the same. It will automatically keep track of where you left off, so bookmarks are used to mark other things.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ziegl027
6) Ease of transfer—Can I hook the unit up to any (PC) computer and dump files onto it the way I can a jump drive? Or does there have to be some kind of reader software on the computer that it goes though? I’m a bit of a nomad at work, working on a variety of public stations. I want this to be as easy (or almost as easy) as selecting “print” and walking to the nearest networked printer. It would be a big fat drag if I had to dump files onto a jump drive, walk back to my private office (which is two floors up and technically in a different building from where I actually work), upload those files into a library program of some kind, then transfer them onto the device. Add some kind of conversion step in there and it’s probably a deal killer.
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When I use an SD card I can just dump the files on it and then put the card in my Reader. You can also use a cable to put the files directly onto the device, but there's one problem: unless you use calibre you don't get the tags, so you'll have to hunt for the files by their titles or authors. The Reader will get this information from the PDF properties.
Hope that helped a little. Very good questions.