How I got 4000 plus books to show

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by kevin_boone

The PRS doesn't cope well with text documents that are formatted with hard line breaks -- and that's nearly all of them, so far as I can see. Unless, as you say, you have stripped the text out of some other format. Most of the Gutenberg texts, for example, are formatted for a fixed-width font display of 70-80 columns. Unless you actually install fixed-width fonts of the appropriate size on the reader (which I guess is possible), then you end up with all the line breaks in stupid places:

[...]
If you're converting from HTML or something with a specific paragraph divider, then all you have to is strip all the line breaks and put in a line break wherever there is a line-breaking or para-breaking tag -- that's easy enough.

If your text files have blank lines between paragraphs, then any2lrf will convert them to LRF files and correctly re-wrap the paragraphs.

But my point is that, unless you already have a large collection that is already in a format that the reader can read well, you're going to have to do some sort of conversion.

Which is where being a progammer comes in handy.
I've now a utility that will scan through my library and promote PalmDoc to Text, PDF to Text, Text to Html, Html to LRF or Html to ePub, combine series intoa single LRF or ePub and dump the final files into a directory I can import into calibre to load onto the 505.
That way I can keep my books in whatever format I already have them, and get them automatically progressed up to the right end format. I would have thought you could do some of this with calibre's library functions.
If you have just the Sony Library software, then I would agree that trying to manage any large or diverse library of books would be very difficult.

I don't disbelieve you -- but I do think that if you find the PRS navigation adequate with a very large collection, you're in the minority, and most likely a minority of one.

I've now got a system I can live with, where I use collections to indicate genre, then have a 'book' within that collection for each Author-Series combination, then a TOC in that 'book' to jump to the actual book in the series. I would certainly be happier if the 505 just let me browse folders on the memory card and pick books from there.

[kevin_boone]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

Which is where being a progammer comes in handy.
I've now a utility that will scan through my library and promote PalmDoc to Text, PDF to Text, Text to Html, Html to LRF or Html to ePub, combine series intoa single LRF or ePub and dump the final files into a directory I can import into calibre to load onto the 505.
That way I can keep my books in whatever format I already have them, and get them automatically progressed up to the right end format. I would have thought you could do some of this with calibre's library functions.

Writing a program or script that can re-flow plain text documents so that they sort of work OK on the PRS is not really a problem. Applying such a problem to a batch of files is also not a problem.

The problem -- or so it seems to me -- is that it's exceptionally difficult to implement a program or script that will re-flow text documents _well_, in a completely hands-off manner. And that's what you need to batch-convert a whole heap of stuff. Unless you're not very fussy, I suppose.

Of course, you might be lucky. You might have a heap of text documents that are all very similar in format. They might all have neat right margins, nice spacing between paragraphs, nice spacing under titles, etc. But my experience is the opposite. Browsing through a few of the text ebooks I've got on my PC I find

* Files with average 50-100 characters per line
* Files with no hard line breaks at all, except at the ends of pages
* Files where para breaks are indicated only by space indents
* Files with blank lines between text lines (like double-spacing on a typewriter)
* Files with extra white-space padding at the start of line (so you can't assume that white space at the start is a para break)
* Files with hard page feeds and page numbers embedded
* Files with other headers and footers interspersed with text
* Files with no spacing between titles and text
* Files with weird (Microsoft?) symbols where there should be quote marks and hyphens
* Purported text files that actually have HTML tags and entities in
* Files with word hyphenation hard-coded (so you can't distinguish between a dash and a word split by a hyphen)

The code I've written can cope with all these anomalies, but it can't _guess_ which ones are present in a given file. I don't know of any program that can but, if you do, I'd love to know about it. I'd love to be able to batch-process my 9,000 or so text ebooks and be sure of getting a reasonable read on the PRS for every one.

In practice, my experience is that, even with software, I have to manually inspect and tweak pretty much every text document I want to put on the reader.

[Student1]

Its sad the device can t handle large collections easely... i have over 25000 books i was excited to get on the device but it now seems a pain to get it to work properly! Guess i ll have to wait for something more powerfull...

[voidIndigo]

And here was I thinking that I screwed something up! Once I tried to jam my favorite sci-fi colection in my PRS505 (around 1000 books in a 8 gb card), and after 2 hours of waiting for it to read it (I thinks there's an error here), I gave up and took the card.

I never uploaded more than 20-30 books at a time, because of the long time it took to recognize the content. It´s really annoying. And now I find out that I couldn't put my library into it, even if I wait for whatever hours?? That's absurd.

Sealbeater is right. If there was a mp3 player with this "feature", it would be in that beautiful junkyard up in heaven a long time ago...

[kevin_boone]

I think many mp3 players do, in fact, have the same kinds of problem -- the whole Apple range, for a start. But the problems are not all that noticeable, because the speed of the user interface is much, much faster, as is the speed of the CPU. The limitation on the PRS, I think, is that in order to maintain the phenomenal battery life, the CPU clocks over at 150MHz or thereabouts -- way slower even than an MP3 player.

When you put a memory card in, the PRS has to examine each file, parse out the metadata (if there is any), and build it's own internal indexes. That's going to take a long time with such slow hardware.

Although this wouldn't be to everyone's taste, it would suit me if the PRS just `lost' this indexing feature altogether, and let me put files into a folder layout of my choice. That would solve the navigation and card-scanning problems both at a stroke. But I appreciate that many people like to use metadata for organization.

But I have two high-capacity MP3 players from different vendors (Archos and Cowon) and both manage to offer both methods to users. It shouldn't be that difficult for Sony to do so. My gut feeling is that it isn't a limitation in the PRS that prevents this being implemented, but more likely a limitation of the Sony PC software or the protocol it uses to communicate with the reader. The ability to treat the PRS storage as disk-like (with folders, etc) is a new thing in the 505 -- the 500 could not. So perhaps it's the PC software that's holding back Sony from doing the right thing on the reader?

[kellynj]

I just got my PRS 505 back from Sony after going in for service for recurrent problems with the Reader not reading books off the SD card. I should have been looking here instead of with Sony :-( "We've never heard of someone putting 500 books on one of these cards before".

I've currently got about 600 ebooks for the PRS 505, sorted into collections by author and I seem to have hit the SNAFU point with the programming. Can anyone explain how I can load more books onto this SD card in a way someone that doesn't know what file extensions means can understand? Thanks!

[F1Wild]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

...if the average mp3 is 3 minutes in length and I have 10,000, that's 30,000 minutes or 20.8333333 days. Nobody suggests that a person is going to listen to them all sequentially nor is that considered unusual. I guess everything is relative.

Speaking of relative - when we got maaried, my spouse and I combined our music, downloaded it all on our PC music library and so far we have over 89 days of continous music (not counting the hundreds of CDs yet to be categorized/placed in our proper library)...and we love it - playing "random" all the time or play various genres, etc. I would guess you are similar in your reading!

[Renaldo]

Originally Posted by kellynj

I just got my PRS 505 back from Sony after going in for service for recurrent problems with the Reader not reading books off the SD card. I should have been looking here instead of with Sony :-( "We've never heard of someone putting 500 books on one of these cards before".

I've currently got about 600 ebooks for the PRS 505, sorted into collections by author and I seem to have hit the SNAFU point with the programming. Can anyone explain how I can load more books onto this SD card in a way someone that doesn't know what file extensions means can understand? Thanks!

You're not even close to the SNAFU point as you call it. If you're crashing the sony software I'd reccomend using calibre and getting a better quality SD card, or even a good quality memory stick. I've continually had 1000+ books on my reader since I bought it. I use collections. When I used a really cheap 2gb SD card, Sony software would crash, the reader sometimes crashed, and when it didn't it took 20 minutes to initialize and index itself. I replaced it with a good memory stick instead, and started using Calibre. Nothing crashes and it takes 3-5 minutes to index after I unplug it.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by sealbeater

I know what you are getting at, I actually have a chart somewhere of number of books and correlation to load time, to answer your question, it took approx. 1 hour and 15 minutes. This was not all loaded at once, I had to do a folder at a time across two flash memory devices because of some as yet unknown upper file limit or flash corruption, so it actually took most of my Friday and Saturday nights. Well worth it to me, however I want them all, so I'm going to try 250 books per folder when I feel like trying again. When/If I find the load time chart, I'll post it.

I recall the suggestion being made elsewhere that if the Sony software is used (instead of Calibre or just straight drag-and-drop), that should eliminate or reduce excessive wait times (i.e.: processing would be done on the computer prior to upload, instead of thereafter by the reader's own hardware).

Not that I expect you to start playing around with reloading your 4000+ books, but have you tried this, or has anyone else?

- Ahi

[river]

I remember my iriver H320 mp3 player had the same indexing issue. To get round this the file structure, was 'a/anthony robbins/unlimited power/file'

It's a real shame the PRS-505 can't just do folder navigation....

I wanted to put everything on an 8GB and then just add updates now and again.... is this likely to be sorted on a firmware update? I have around 1700 files.

[DrMoze]

Originally Posted by bkilian

I'm always impressed to see how different peoples reading styles are. I could never keep track of the storylines of more than one book at a time. Good luck with your quest.

and

Funny, I spend all of my time with my Reader enjoyably reading one book after another, taking it with me everywhere and reading more than I used to. I am so glad I do not have this obsessive compulsion to have *every* ebook that I won't read for weeks/months/years (if ever) loaded on the device, nor am I wasting my time writing scripts and being PO'd at my Reader because I can't load all of these books on it that I've barely heard of and have no intention of reading any time soon (if ever). My Reader provides me with a constant and endless succession of books that I can choose from and read. What more would I (or MOST people) want from it?

I'm enjoying my Reader for what it was made for. Sorry that you're clearly not enjoying yours.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by bkilian

I'm always impressed to see how different peoples reading styles are. I could never keep track of the storylines of more than one book at a time. Good luck with your quest.

I don't see where it's that different from keeping up with more that one TV or movie series at a time.
Don't you keep up with more than one thread at a time in this forum?

[Wetdogeared]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I don't see where it's that different from keeping up with more that one TV or movie series at a time.
Don't you keep up with more than one thread at a time in this forum?

It's easy if you colour code them.

[bkilian]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I don't see where it's that different from keeping up with more that one TV or movie series at a time.
Don't you keep up with more than one thread at a time in this forum?

Threads in the Forum don't really have a narrative to keep track of. I do spend a lot of time reading backwards when I get lost though. As for TV shows, I generally tivo a whole season and then watch it all at once, but there are a few shows I watch week to week, and I find that I get confused over which events happened in which show, so not ideal.

TV show storylines (that aren't babylon 5) generally don't have a deep narrative, you can mostly jump in at any episode and not have to worry about what happened earlier. They'll tell you the important bits at the beginning of the episode. Books don't generally do that chapter to chapter.

When I was reading the Belgariad and Mallorean as they came out, I would reread the entire series for each book that came out. By the last book, I had read the first five 6 times. (I bought the first 5 all at once). the same for the Honor Harrington series, and Harry Potter. If I don't do that, then I can't keep track of the storylines.

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by DrMoze

and

Funny, I spend all of my time with my Reader enjoyably reading one book after another, taking it with me everywhere and reading more than I used to. I am so glad I do not have this obsessive compulsion to have *every* ebook that I won't read for weeks/months/years (if ever) loaded on the device, nor am I wasting my time writing scripts and being PO'd at my Reader because I can't load all of these books on it that I've barely heard of and have no intention of reading any time soon (if ever). My Reader provides me with a constant and endless succession of books that I can choose from and read. What more would I (or MOST people) want from it?

I'm enjoying my Reader for what it was made for. Sorry that you're clearly not enjoying yours.

Hate on, hater.