PRS-600 Which format to choose

[Pierre-Olivier]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The solution to that is simple - don't keep 1300 books on your SD card. I have a 20,000+ eBook collection on my hard disk at home, but keep "only" a few dozen books on my reader - that's about a year's reading for me.

well, as I'm able to read a 700-pages book in a day I certainly wouldn't limit the number of books like you do.

I definately don't agree with you when saying " don't keep 1300 books on your SD Card". Well are we in the 21st century or not. If a device like Sony Reader (or anyone else), with huge processor inside is unable to sort a list of 1300 books in more than a few seconds, it's nothing else but a shame !

I've read here someone proposing to rename Sony Reader application as pieceofcrap.exe . I dare say that I completely agree, this application (on Mac) is horribly slow. So I wonder about the way both this application and the firmware have been writen.

Why giving the possibility to a PRS-600 to handle both a 16 GB SD Card and an equal memorystick, if the software is unable to dealt with.

I want to have all my books with me, That's why I buy a Reader able to receive external cards.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Pierre-Olivier

Why giving the possibility to a PRS-600 to handle both a 16 GB SD Card and an equal memorystick, if the software is unable to dealt with.

Primarily for MP3 files, I suspect.

[Pierre-Olivier]

Perhaps, but I continue to suspect a bad programming, since, even with "only" 400 books, the time needed by the firmware to sort the library was much too long ...

And, to me, the main goal of an eReader is to handle properly eBooks. You can also use .jpg files with it, although it's a matter of little interest (to my eyes), since it's only in gray levels ...

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Pierre-Olivier

Perhaps, but I continue to suspect a bad programming, since, even with "only" 400 books, the time needed by the firmware to sort the library was much too long ...

And, to me, the main goal of an eReader is to handle properly eBooks. You can also use .jpg files with it, although it's a matter of little interest (to my eyes), since it's only in gray levels ...

Don't misunderstand me - I entirely agree with you that it's a nuisance. I find myself, though, that it works OK with 300 or so books on the device, and that's enough for me personally.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The only thing you must avoid doing is transferring books to the Reader with more than one of them in the same "session".

Why is that?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Harmon

Why is that?

Because it screws up the book catalog on the Reader, and leads to all sorts of nasty data corruption.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Because it screws up the book catalog on the Reader, and leads to all sorts of nasty data corruption.

Hmmm. I haven't experienced that. Yet?

[Selcien]

Originally Posted by Bremen Cole

Actually i did try that. I set the margins at "0" and ran it. For some odd reason it did not change a thing. I did it again, setting the margins to "0" but converted to lrf, and it was good. I normally covert everything to epub, this is the first time I had a problem with the conversion.....

I haven't had any luck fixing margins by converting from epub to epub, so what I do is convert to mobi, get rid of the epub file, and then convert back to epub. It's worked every time for me, converting from lrf back to epub should also fix the margins.

[elcreative]

If you think that's way too long, wait until you put around 6K books on and the rescan takes over 3 hours (best done overnight) which is a serious amount of time. I'm not sure how much faster you may get on yours (I use a 505) tho' there is at least a workaround for the 505 by hacking the firmware...

Essentially the memory card capability is, for the most part, far larger than practical to use with the standard reader scan.

Originally Posted by Pierre-Olivier

Perhaps, but I continue to suspect a bad programming, since, even with "only" 400 books, the time needed by the firmware to sort the library was much too long ...

[Pierre-Olivier]

Originally Posted by elcreative

If you think that's way too long, wait until you put around 6K books on and the rescan takes over 3 hours (best done overnight) which is a serious amount of time. I'm not sure how much faster you may get on yours (I use a 505) tho' there is at least a workaround for the 505 by hacking the firmware...

Essentially the memory card capability is, for the most part, far larger than practical to use with the standard reader scan.

It takes more than 5 minutes with 1300 books. And I find it too long. If it took 3 hours like you says, i will have to sell my eReader.

THe main problem is that it goes on the sorting process each timeI disconnect it from the USB after charging the battery, even if no transfer has been done.

I will absolutely need a power adaptor ...

[kronium]

Thanks for the help Bremen and Olivier! Olivier, I would like to scan a book called Essentials of Fire Fighting, But there are a lot of pictures and diagrams. I guess making pdfs would be the best bet. Any tips on scanning, OCR, and correcting with the Sony Reader? Seems like a daunting task. Thanks

Originally Posted by Pierre-Olivier

I'm too new in Calibre to give you a "good" answer. I hope that someone else could give you good advise.

However, it's not really a problem to install both Calibre, and Sony Reader Library. You can use each of them but absolutely not in the same time. You MUST quit one before launching the other.

I don' know how is the application with a PC using Windows, since i'm on a Mac, but the the Mac Application is very very slooooooooowwwwwww ! It's really a shame that programmers could release such a thing ....

I don't know if Calibre is able to handle with Word Documents. But SOny application tranform them before sending to eReader.

Personally, I create some eBooks for my own purpose (Scanning, OCR, correction, and editing in pdf or rtf format). But I don't use Word, since the file I obtained when saving in RTF format is huge.

[kronium]

Does Calibre have a word conversion option? Couldn't find it.

Also, when I try converting word documents with the Sony software, it asks for word to be installed first. Anyway to convert without having Word installed?

[JSWolf]

Save as RTF and try that.

[Pierre-Olivier]

Originally Posted by kronium

Thanks for the help Bremen and Olivier! Olivier, I would like to scan a book called Essentials of Fire Fighting, But there are a lot of pictures and diagrams. I guess making pdfs would be the best bet. Any tips on scanning, OCR, and correcting with the Sony Reader? Seems like a daunting task. Thanks

Hello,

Scanning is not the worst task, nor OCR-ising, it's the correction after OCR which takes numerous hours.

When I make an eBook, it's mainly from novels. Some of them (Heroïc Fantasy) have some graphics at the beginning (essentially maps). So it's easy to add these few pictures as plain page graphics.

In your case, the best thing is to do a PDF, each page is considered like a picture. But you can do that only if the original size of your book is not far from the size of the eReader's screen. If not, the jpg files should appear much smaller than their actual size.

I don't (or exceptionally) use this format, because of the big size of the final document (20-30 MB instead of less than 1 MB in text format).

But, as I realized that the stupid firmware takes a lot of time to organize the internal library of the PRS-600 with a great number of files, I think tha in the future, most of my books will be in this format. Just with more SD (or MS-Pro) cards, than I intended previously. It will be hugely time saver, I think.

When scanning, you have to beware to few things, in order not to waste time :

- always place your book in the same position in the scanner.
- determine the scanning area without a lot of white space around the the text. I eliminate also the headers or foot-pages with the pages number. But if your book has a great number of pages, you have to control from time to time that the scans are OK, because, even if the book is always placed at the same place, the text area is slightly moving because of the width of the book.