need help to decide sony reader

[lev]

hey everyone,

this is my first post here and I'm new to ebooks. I've been travelling and living in different parts of the world for a while now so the ebook readers are making more and more sense to use as the convenience of having all my books in one place is great. for the last few years I unfortunately had to let go of a lot of books when moving to another country, as shipping cost and the inevitable move again made it expensive and inconvenient.

At the moment I'm really interested in the sony prs-600 which will be out soon. I know no one has seen it and hence can't make any good or bad comments but my question is more specific to ereaders in general. One main purpose for buying a reader is to use it for my postgraduate studies. I go through a lot of pdf documents and with the Prs-600 I can use pdf files and take handwritten notes...so far so good.

my question is do the pdf files display true page numbers??? I will need the page numbers for referencing. If it does it would be great as I can use the pdf files on the reader instead of printing them out which is costing me a fortune in printing (paper and ink!!)...

hope sony reader owners can help me out with my question.

thanks in advance!

[emellaich]

Unfortunately, what you propose with page numbers is not very workable. First some background.

Some pdf's have fixed page sizes -- roughly the size of a sheet of paper. Now picture viewing these pages with a six inch window. Furthermore, you can't just slide the window around -- you need to refresh the screen when you slide the window around. If you zoom out so you can see more of the page the text isn't readable. Many (most?) academic PDF's are this type and you will really wish you had a larger screen reader.

Other PDF's reflow the text. This means that one page is however much text fits on one screen. You have two problems with this approach. First, many times the most important information is in tables, diagrams, and graphics that don't reflow. Second, page two in the reflowed (reflown?) text is page one in the printed text. The page number will not be correct.

[wallcraft]

The PRS-600 is an updated PRS-700, and for PDFs I think the Sony's do display the "physical" page number. Currently, to get notes off the PRS-700 you have to use the Windows Sony eBook Library app and they can't easily be printed. See Highlighting Question. Sony has announced Mac support, and also that the notes can be printed with the new software. On the PRS-700, notes are plain text but the PRS-600 they will add hand written notes (so the interface etcetera may change).

[lev]

thanks emellaich and wallcraft,

Can someone confirm that sony does display PDF physical page numbers? if they do then I am all set to buy the prs-600.

I also read about handwriting and export of notes which made me seriously consider buying sony readers. and the mac support..

thanks

[davidspitzer]

Originally Posted by lev

hey everyone,

this is my first post here and I'm new to ebooks. I've been travelling and living in different parts of the world for a while now so the ebook readers are making more and more sense to use as the convenience of having all my books in one place is great. for the last few years I unfortunately had to let go of a lot of books when moving to another country, as shipping cost and the inevitable move again made it expensive and inconvenient.

At the moment I'm really interested in the sony prs-600 which will be out soon. I know no one has seen it and hence can't make any good or bad comments but my question is more specific to ereaders in general. One main purpose for buying a reader is to use it for my postgraduate studies. I go through a lot of pdf documents and with the Prs-600 I can use pdf files and take handwritten notes...so far so good.

my question is do the pdf files display true page numbers??? I will need the page numbers for referencing. If it does it would be great as I can use the pdf files on the reader instead of printing them out which is costing me a fortune in printing (paper and ink!!)...

hope sony reader owners can help me out with my question.

thanks in advance!

here is a copy of a recent post i made which I believe is topical to your question:

I am a second year law student and I also work full time and have a family - The prospect of lugging around 65 pounds of book to and from work so I can read at lunch was an instant "no-go".

I buy the cheapest versions of the paper book (come on law book publishers get with the program already and produce ebook versions) - falling apart is fine and I cut the spine off so I have individual pages (Kinkos will do it for a nominal charge) I then run the pages through a Fujitsu scan snap scanner to PDF - I crop the pages to within millimeters of the text and delete all the pages before the actual page 1 so that the actual eBook pages match the physical pages that way I can also crop off the page numbers in some books

I have tried a dr1000, a kindle (no good at all since pdf support is minimal - and don’t even get me started on the page numbering weirdness - although the DX may be better I fear that the device will fail when trying to open a 1400 page pdf) and a Sony 505 - I have sold the DR1000 and stuck with the Sony 505 and here is why - the pdf support for large books was just too flakey on the DR1000 plus I feel they have priced themselves out of the market - The Sony 505 with a pdf converted to LRF has never had an issue with any scanned book even my 1400 page ones

For the 505 I ran the pdf's through pdfread 1.8.2 - and rotated the pages sideways and in thirds this gives you the maximum readability and takes up the maximum width of the screen - also it is very portable and convenient and I can pull it out unobtrusively when I have breaks in meetings etc - Since I alighned the page numbers - can simply type in 255 and go right to page 255 (note the picture below the page numbers don’t match because another trick I learned is I extract all my reading for a module (our classes are yearlong broken into 30 modules) and concatenate it so i can just read through all my topics without having to hunt and peck through 12 eBooks’)

With regards to copyright - since I purchased all the books I believe this falls under the "fair Use exception" much like ripping your cd to Itunes or at least I believe I have a strong case for such use - I attached a picture

The key though is getting them into electronic format - I don't just read them on my sony 505 but also on my pc and mac. Regardless, the first step is to get them into a PDf and OCR them - A previous poster was right you really need to get Adobe Acrobat pro or you wont get far. In Adobe Pro you can crop, delete, reorder and OCR the pages. Because of the extensive footnoting used in most law texts, I have found extracting the text alone to be less than useful. In my experience the book has to maintained as an image, but the ocr will allow you to search it on your PC.

Kinko's will cut the binding off, but at least near me, would not do the scanning for fear of copyright issues; so i scanned them myself. Afterwards I had them rebound at Kinkos with comb or spiral binding (depending on thickness) - not as asthetically pleasing but in some odd way more functional as the books now lie perfectly flat when open.

Bottom Line once in PDF format you can pretty much freely transform it to just about any ebook reader in the format of your choice

[lev]

thanks davidspitzer,

from the attached picture you can see the page number on the PDF file which is exactly what I was looking for. I gather as long as the pdf document shows each page number I can use it for uni research and include page numbers for reference. And the fact that you can export notes to computer might just make it perfect for such use.
I hope there will be previews (esp on youtube) before the launch date so I can make a more informed decision whether to buy it or not.