PRS-600 SD card vs. Main Memory and other question

[CelesteGB]

Hey!

Can you tell me of any advantages/disadvantages for storing and/or reading your books on the Main memory or on an SD card? I have heard that the battery drains faster if you use the SD card and there may be issues with delays in page-turning if I read the info in this forum correctly.

Also, when I plug in my ebook to my laptop, Windows tells me there may be errors on the ebook because I unplugged it while transferring (which is a possibility hehe). Since I have all my books stored on the SD card also at the moment, what would be the best way to clean the files on my ebook? Delete, then what...? Then reinstall Format...? I want to ask before I screw things up royally

Thanks in advance,

Celeste

[kazbates]

I'm not an expert, by any means, but I wanted to bump your questions up to the front of the queue.

I've noticed that using my Memory Stick causes a quicker depletion of the battery. There is a slight delay after I install the memory stick when the reader is loading and I've also noticed a slight delay upon opening a new ebook from the memory card, but other than that, I haven't been aware of any page turning delays.

I've had a great deal of problems when disconnect my reader from ELS. If I just unplugged the reader from the cable, it causes my reader to freeze and I have to do a soft reset. If I eject the reader using by selecting the eject button on the ELS screen, ELS freezes and I have to do a hard shutdown on my laptop and reboot the entire system. I've spoken to Sony support about the problem but the suggestions they gave me were useless.

As for cleaning up my ebooks, I don't delete anything. I'm an ebook pack rat!

[CelesteGB]

Thanks

Understood on the battery...just didn't know if there were any pro's to keeping them all in main memory or reading off the SD card. I know I had a heck of a time getting the books to the card because I kept getting errors in calibre.

After I posted this, my ebooks locked up and I learned the art of reset

I wouldn't dream of deleting a book permanently. I'm a packrat also as my basement condition will show! Nice thing about SD cards is they don't take up space.

I just need to clean up the files because Windows said there may be errors and then I would re-install all the books I did finish my first book on my Sony...after I finally stopped messing around with libraries and downloading books and generally playing with it *g*

I still have a huge pile of paperbacks I acquired over the summer...what a shame I didn't get a reader sooner!

Thanks again

[Dragon_Well]

I got freezes which required a reset when using a memory stick. The SD card is more stable but still occasionally freezes and is noticeably slower when using the zoom function in pdfs, or browsing a lengthy set of bookmarks. BTW all my ebooks are pdf, so these findings could vary with other formats.


By far the easiest and fastest file manager I've found is here.

[HarryT]

Do you find the capacity of the main memory to be inadequate? I currently have 171 books on my PRS-600 (many of which are multi-book "omnibus" editions) and the memory is less than half full.

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Do you find the capacity of the main memory to be inadequate? I currently have 171 books on my PRS-600 (many of which are multi-book "omnibus" editions) and the memory is less than half full.

I've never actually tried to load all of my books on my 600 to see if it would reach capacity. I'm using my memory stick more for organization than anything. I have noticed, though, that I seem to need to charge my 600 more often than I did my 700. I'm not sure why that is. Of course, I have over a 800 notes just on the books I have stored directly on the reader and access those notes frequently. I also have a tendency to return to the List page to look at other books even when I'm in the middle of reading something else. But, I did all that with my 700.The charging issue, is a bit mind boggling.

[MelC]

I second the freezing comment vis a vis the memory stick. I had terrible freezing issues when I first got it the device (with a memory stick). I have not had a single problem since I deep sixed the memory stick.

Mel

[metalheadmalta]

Hi to all...here are some technical notes for you then. The memory stick is more power hungry than the SD Card, and of course, the internal memory.

Thus, it will need charging more often. The only way this can do damage to your battery is in the charge/discharge cycle...so logically, books should be in the internal memory.

I have not yet experienced any freeze-up on my PRS505. The only reason I keep stuff on a memory stick is the easier way I can access them. That's all. It would have been easier to just see the Sony memory as a usb drive, but knowing sony, that is just a dream.

The best format for a book is RTF. Just plonk your text into word and save it as rtf with a size of 14. Then you can zoom to the level required.

Cheers, chris

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by metalheadmalta

The best format for a book is RTF. Just plonk your text into word and save it as rtf with a size of 14. Then you can zoom to the level required.

I could not disagree with you more, I'm afraid . The Sony supports neither illustrations, hyperlinks, nor a table of contents in an RTF file. It's hardly, therefore, the "ideal" format!

[Dragon_Well]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Do you find the capacity of the main memory to be inadequate? I currently have 171 books on my PRS-600 (many of which are multi-book "omnibus" editions) and the memory is less than half full.

For my particular purposes it is. My primary use of the device is for work. I'm a med student, and use the reader to carry reference material and journal articles, some of which are >100 MB. I have a total of 4 fiction books in the internal memory and ~400 reference books on the SD card.

If I used the device more for fiction or pleasure reading, the internal memory would probably be much more useful.

[Unireader]

Same experience here-- I'm a med student too, and my reference tombs are just too big to fit in the internal memory. To make things simpler, I just put everything on an SD card, including fiction. I've discovered though that the SD card depletes the battery charge pretty quickly. No where near the "1000s of page turns" claimed by Sony. Of course many pages involve photos and diagrams that require more changes on the screen than text might. My new strategy is to place the few most frequently accessed books and other files (almost all pdf format) in the internal memory, and keep things less frequently used in the SD card. Unfortunately neither the Sony eBook library software nor Calibre give a running total in megabytes of a group of files/ebooks. It would be really helpful to be able to select a bunch of files until I reach the limit of the internal memory, then load them. Instead, I have to add them in groups or one by one until I get the warning that the memory is full.

[MelC]

Originally Posted by Unireader

... It would be really helpful to be able to select a bunch of files until I reach the limit of the internal memory, then load them. Instead, I have to add them in groups or one by one until I get the warning that the memory is full.

Can't you just cut and paste them in from your file directory in details view with file size showing? No need to use software to load them in.

Mel

[owlrigh]

Originally Posted by CelesteGB

Thanks
I wouldn't dream of deleting a book permanently. I'm a packrat also as my basement condition will show! Nice thing about SD cards is they don't take up space.

At one point I put all of my ebooks onto a large SD card and put it into my 505; it then grew annoying to have to scroll through it all to find the book I wanted. I don't recall -- having my PRS700 was a while ago -- was there a search function? That would of course make it all right for having one's whole library on the ereader, for the annoying scrolling part would be done away with.

Nowadays I keep everything on my computer, and upload a batch of books via calibre once a week or so; usually in a series, if it's that way inclined, so I can easily go onto the next book...

[HarryT]

Yes, the PRS-600 and 700 have search function for book titles. But even so, the "scan time" when you insert a card into the Reader makes having many thousands of titles impractical.

[Dragon_Well]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Yes, the PRS-600 and 700 have search function for book titles. But even so, the "scan time" when you insert a card into the Reader makes having many thousands of titles impractical.

Originally Posted by owlrigh

At one point I put all of my ebooks onto a large SD card and put it into my 505; it then grew annoying to have to scroll through it all to find the book I wanted. I don't recall -- having my PRS700 was a while ago -- was there a search function? That would of course make it all right for having one's whole library on the ereader, for the annoying scrolling part would be done away with.

Nowadays I keep everything on my computer, and upload a batch of books via calibre once a week or so; usually in a series, if it's that way inclined, so I can easily go onto the next book...

The 400+ titles I have organized into ~30 collections are easy to manage on the Sony whether browing by collection or book title. The book title list has A-Z running vertically down the screen, and it is quite easy and fast to jump around.

It does take a bit of time to scan the card when it's initially inserted into the reader, but as long as you're not taking the card out and reinserting it every day, it's a non-issue.

When you say "may thousands of titles", I'm sure the Sony must have some type of maximum practical limit to the number of files it can store before it's database becomes unmanageable. If you had a ton of single page files for example, a reasonable workaround might be to combine them into a bookmarked pdf and sort the bookmarks alphabetically.