Hello!

[EricQ]

Hi everyone,

I currently just picked up an e-book reader (Sony PRS-505) and have been browsing the forums recently. It's great to see that there is an active community dedicated to e-readers despite their infancy. A little bit about me though; I'm currently a second year philosophy student who hates carrying around books . I have a ton of PDFs and some DJVUs here and there on my computer that number in the hundreds. Well, you know how it is, no one can read a 300 page book on a laptop screen for any length of time. Therefore, I decided to get the PRS-505 being the cheapest and having the best utility for the price.

At the moment, I'm working on getting my whole PDF/DJVU library on the device with no text formatting issues. Putting the PDFs straight on the device gives me some broken formatting issues with the text when I zoom. I then tried LRF using an image-based converter which displays the text nicely unzoomed, but then again, I can't zoom in at all. I then tried calibre which is text-based, but it gets rid of the images and diagrams and also has some text formatting issues when I zoom in.

Any tips to get the text and images perfectly (well, almost perfectly) displayed on my PRS-505? I've noticed a lot of good philosophy classics in the e-book library on the site with images and text that formats properly when you zoom in. I just can't seem to replicate that kind of formatting.

[Stitchawl]

Hi Eric, welcome to MobilRead! I too use a Sony 505 and love it. I wish you luck with PDF's though... I haven't been too happy with the results I get. Fortunately there are plenty of people here in this forum with far better computer skills than mine, and they can tell you just what you'll need to do to format the PDFs properly. Once you have it down, please come to my house and format all of mine. Thanks.

Stitchawl

[FizzyWater]

Hi, Eric!

Welcome to Mobileread!

[desertgrandma]

welcome to MobileRead, Eric.

[dreams]

Hi Eric and welcome to MR.

I have the 505 also (*BLUE*) and love it. I especially love the fact that I can borrow library books if I want.

Don't forget to take time off and read for fun. We have lots of beautifully formatted ebooks for free right here on MR. We are also lucky to have author members who very generously share their work with us.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by EricQ

Any tips to get the text and images perfectly (well, almost perfectly) displayed on my PRS-505? I've noticed a lot of good philosophy classics in the e-book library on the site with images and text that formats properly when you zoom in. I just can't seem to replicate that kind of formatting.

There's no simple & easy answers; PDFs aren't made to convert from, nor for easy reflow of the content--they're designed as ready-for-print, and all other uses have less support.

Potential workarounds include:
Convert the PDF to a Word or HTML doc (there's free software to do this online, or else send it to a gmail account, open as HTML, and save that file); use Calibre or other ebook software to convert *that* into something readable.

Use Acrobat Pro to add accessibility tags to the PDFs; this sometimes fixes the line-wrap problems when reflowing the text to a larger size. (Not always, though; a lot depends on what software was used to create the PDF in the first place.)

Sometimes, just cropping out the whitespace around the edges makes the remainder small enough to read semi-comfortably, especially by using landscape view on the PRS.

I hope you find something that works for you. Getting textbooks to view properly on ebook readers is one of the biggest issues for ebooks right now... don't you feel lucky to be involved in a cutting edge industry?

[GraceKrispy]

Welcome to the forum! the 505 is an awesome reader, I hope you enjoy it, and I hope the tips you get help you out. I only use mine for recreational reading, so I'm not much help, but WELCOME!