PRS-350 pdf and epub making PRS-350 crash

[Mencken]

I download most of what I read in pdf and epub formats from archive.org. With increasing frequency of late, what happens is this:

I download from archive.org.

I add the new books to Calibre (still using it on Windows XP).

Then I move the new books to the PRS-350, again, of course, using Calibre.

When I eject the reader and go to Collections, I'll see the "Unread books" folder and how ever many new books I moved into there.

Now I'm ready to read a new book. At this point, one of two things will happen:

Most commonly, as soon as I select the "Unread books" folder, the reader's screen goes blank, all white. The reader is just shut off, crashed. I can turn it right back on and it goes to the home screen just fine, telling me that no book is selected.

Less commonly, the "Unread books" folder will open; I will see my new books as icons; I will select one; and, again, the screen goes blank white and I have to turn the reader back on again.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is my reader going dotty a little at a time? Is there any fix? Is there any workaround? Is there any reason? Or is there even any excuse?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[Ghitulescu]

I never liked the books at archive.org. You may try one of the online ePub checkers

[retro]

I've had my 350 shut down when opening a book occasionally. I use Calibre and usually just convert from epub to epub, delete it from the device and add it back. Just make sure your output profile is set for Sony Reader. The pdfs can't be fixed like that, unfortunately.

[Ripplinger]

It's probably a badly formatted book causing the problem and not anything wrong with your reader. The epub-to-epub conversion should fix it. PDFs you might try running them through some PDF optimization program if you have one available, like Foxit or Adobe.

[beespeckled]

Sorry in advance if this is too long of a post:

I thought my 350 had bit the dust. For vacation a few weeks ago, I had downloaded 2 pdf travel guides for the area we were visiting as well as 2 epubs for pleasure reading (thru overdrive) 2nd night of vacation my 350 freezes, then acts like it is shutting down but frozen in the shutdown process. Using the power button nothing happens, so then I put it on charger (dc wall plug in) hoping for a clean reset/reboot. After a few minutes I check it, and the message is "cannot detect usb connection" no battery power to device, to paraphrase. I unplugged, the red power light started flashing, then I tried powering it on again, and then it acted like it was going to open but then it stayed in that mode the until last night. (I also found a paper clip to finally try the hard reset since I had nothing to lose at this point) I tried this several times over our vacation, visions of security problems at the airport if the device couldn't power on properly.

After 2 weeks of thinking my beloved 350 was shot, my last ditch effort last night was to plug it into the USB port of my computer to see if it would get it out of this horrible limbo of nothing. My computer recognized it, I left it plugged in for several hours, didn't get the dreaded "unable to find usb connection" so that was promising. I next tried to power on again, red power light would blink off and on but nothing would happen.

Just now, I again inserted the end of a paperclip to try the factory reset/reboot, it didn't seem to be responding, blank screen, no flashing red light to let me know it was trying a hard reset. I took the paper clip out, and then for the heck of it, pushed the power button and presto! It powered up! It didn't let me use the home key function at first but I could see the normal screen. YAY! First thing I did was delete the pdf's!

I suspect that the pdf's were possibly a problem. My reasoning is that Adobe updates to their pdf software wasn't compatible with my older 350. I rarely download pdf's. Only have my camera manuals in pdf on my 350, which are several years old now.

I could be mistaken, and my eReader is giving me advance warning that it is ailing. I haven't had any problems with it up until now, though

I've started to shop around for my next Ereader, though. It is sad that from just a few years ago to now, where there may be only 2, not sure of the status of the Nook at this point. I will check into those as well. But I'm leaning toward the Kobo Glo HD. I want to stay with an open source epub format reader, I have a few purchased books I might want to re-read at some point, and I'm hoping that since Kobo now runs Overdrive, they may come out with what Sony had, wireless delivery from Overdrive in the pipeline.

I'm relieved that my 350 has life it her yet, though

[bookaho!ic]

i used to have a 350 and found that it would always crash when I tried to read a pdf book from the library so I stopped reading pdf lol