Hiding books on your Sony reader

[dsvick]

I think the SD card is the way to go as well. That way you can remove it completely so there is no chance of the book(s) being stumbled over and seen.

With all of the other solutions you should also change the cover image of the book so that it can't be seen if the reader is in that mode as opposed to list mode.

[dorino]

This thread inspired me to check, and low and behold, porn mags look great on the PRS-600.

Thank you, flyash.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I agree that the best move is to store the ebooks you want to hide on an SD card. That way, there is no way for someone to view ebooks that you may not want them to see (such as stories that you may be writing that are not ready to be shared with others). Other methods don't actually prevent people from viewing ebooks you don't want them to see.

As far as collections go, I use collections to control where my ebooks are stored. Some collections are stored on my ereader's internal memory and others I store on my SD card. What I don't do is split collections between the two locations, each collection is either completely in my ereader's internal memory or completely on the SD card.

Originally Posted by flyash

What's your rationale for this?

Originally Posted by dwanthny

If you put items from one collection (let's call the collection Urban Fantasy) on the SD card and in internal memory you get two identically named collections. Urban Fantasy would be listed twice under collections. One collection would have items from the SD card the other collection would have items from internal memory.

I sync my collections to my ereader. To add to the above, if you designate the same collection to sync your ereader's internal memory (IM) and to the the memory card(s), not only will the collection appear in both locations, but the ebooks in the collection will be loaded in both locations too.

In addition to the above reason, I have more ebooks than will fit in my ereader's internal memory. Although I like the formatting control that using PDF gives me, the tradeoff is the size of the files. As an example, I have formatted the Project Gutenberg version of Silas Marner as a PDF and it takes up 1.2MB of space (compared to the original 402KB text file).

Another advantage of syncing collections is that it makes it easy to move my ebooks to the location I want. If I decide to move a collection from my ereader's IM to a memory card all I have to do is click on two checkboxes (one to unsync it from the memory card and one to sync it to my ereader's internal memory) and then sync my ereader.

This extends to reloading my ereader. I recently tried Calibre with my ereader and ended up with a massive number of collections (more than 100) due to tag information contained in my ebooks. Rather than manually deleting the unwanted collections, I formatted my ereader and synced it with the Sony Reader Library. A few minutes later my ebooks and their associated collections were back on my reader.

[flyash]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

If you put items from one collection (let's call the collection Urban Fantasy) on the SD card and in internal memory you get two identically named collections. Urban Fantasy would be listed twice under collections. One collection would have items from the SD card the other collection would have items from internal memory.

OK, that makes sense, thanks.

Originally Posted by dorino

This thread inspired me to check, and low and behold, porn mags look great on the PRS-600.

Thank you, flyash.

No problem. I'm surprised they would look good in B&W and at low resolution and contrast?

[Mike_73]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I sync my collections to my ereader. To add to the above, if you designate the same collection to sync your ereader's internal memory (IM) and to the the memory card(s), not only will the collection appear in both locations, but the ebooks in the collection will be loaded in both locations too.

But you can create collections on the reader and add books from SD-Card to the collection on the reader (I did this before).
If you add the books you want to hide, they will show up in the collection if the card is inserted. If you pop out the card, they're gone.
If you put it back in, they reappear in the appropriate collection.

I did this for some books where I made a collection on the reader with "read next"-collection. But there were books I wanted to add and so I took out the card and added the books via cardreader to the SD-Card. Out of curiosity, I switched on the reader, and the books under "read next" which were saved on SD were gone. So I added the books to SD, put the card back in and checked again. The books allready assigned to the collection reappeared. I then connected to the pc to put the new books to the same collection.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I sync my collections to my ereader. To add to the above, if you designate the same collection to sync your ereader's internal memory (IM) and to the the memory card(s), not only will the collection appear in both locations, but the ebooks in the collection will be loaded in both locations too.

I don't use Sony software so my books weren't duplicated. I would have two identical collection names but with different titles within. The titles on my SD card would be under one and internal memory under the other.

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

This extends to reloading my ereader. I recently tried Calibre with my ereader and ended up with a massive number of collections (more than 100) due to tag information contained in my ebooks.

Wow, I have 1500+ books in calibre and only 55 different tags but I do have 174 different series.

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

Rather than manually deleting the unwanted collections, I formatted my ereader and synced it with the Sony Reader Library. A few minutes later my ebooks and their associated collections were back on my reader.

As long as you use either Sony or Calibre to manage your books things usually go smooth. Removing and adding books is easily as quick in calibre, but you should use the program you're comfortable with.

[rahulm]

If I had to guess, he/she is hiding atheism themed books (Dawkins, Sagan, etc.) from a religious person.

[flyash]

Originally Posted by rahulm

If I had to guess, he/she is hiding atheism themed books (Dawkins, Sagan, etc.) from a religious person.

Pretty good guess.

Though the earlier comment about porn makes me wonder what porn would look like on an e-reader.

[akito38]

You do not lose books marks if you remove the SD or memory stick card. I always remove mine with the reader off and all the bookmarks are still there when I insert the card again at a later date.

Ive only had my reader a week and this was one of the first things I testes since that 512 memory just isn't enough for me. To be fair I am using a memory stick pro duo and I have not tested this with the SD card. But I doubt it would be any different.

[Mike_73]

It works with SD-Cards, too. I tried both, SD and Memory stick.
I had the feeling that the memory sticks are a little faster (supposing you use the same brand and speed type, in my case some sandisk stuff with Ultra II label). I think this may be due to the fact that memory stick is a Sony development