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Oh, most excellent
Aug. 21st, 2008 09:55 pmSony has released a firmware update for the PRS-505 eBook reader, which I have. It now supports reflowing PDF files. Normally the whole point of PDF files is to give the author absolute control of page layout, and when you take a page designed to print properly on 8.5x11 paper and put it on a 5x7 800x600 display, it looks, well, horrible. And zooming in just makes it like looking through a straw; the text didn't wrap to the new size so you had to scroll all around to read.
The new firmware simply breaks the fixed formatting and allows the text to flow, once you zoom in farther than the full-page view. This change takes PDFs from "horrendous" to "totally fine" on the reader. I'd still prefer a native LRF file, they give better page flow, chapter selection, and other features, but this is really nice.
They've also added support for the EPUB format, which apparently is an international open standard format for ebooks. I haven't encountered it myself but it sounds nifty.
Also they now support SDHC, so SD cards bigger than 4GB can be added. Now, I bought a non-SDHC 4GB card for this (because, hey, $14, why not?), and 4GB is enough to hold approximately a squillion ebooks, but the thing also plays MP3s, so I guess that's sort of a reason for big cards. I haven't used the MP3 player portion because it kills the battery and I can't really have music playing when I'm reading anyway. Also it's kind of a lousy MP3 player; no features. SDHC support should be totally standard by now anyway, the darn format has been around for like 3 years.
BTW, if anyone of you have an ebook reader, check out mobileread.com if you haven't already. They have excellent people there and there's a great community effort to post nicely-formatted versions of all the classics up on Project Gutenberg in native reader formats. I was supposed to get something like 100 classics for free from the Sony eBook store, but I didn't bother; it turns out that they're all DRM locked even though they're PD books, and they're not as well formatted as the free ones up on mobileread.
The new firmware simply breaks the fixed formatting and allows the text to flow, once you zoom in farther than the full-page view. This change takes PDFs from "horrendous" to "totally fine" on the reader. I'd still prefer a native LRF file, they give better page flow, chapter selection, and other features, but this is really nice.
They've also added support for the EPUB format, which apparently is an international open standard format for ebooks. I haven't encountered it myself but it sounds nifty.
Also they now support SDHC, so SD cards bigger than 4GB can be added. Now, I bought a non-SDHC 4GB card for this (because, hey, $14, why not?), and 4GB is enough to hold approximately a squillion ebooks, but the thing also plays MP3s, so I guess that's sort of a reason for big cards. I haven't used the MP3 player portion because it kills the battery and I can't really have music playing when I'm reading anyway. Also it's kind of a lousy MP3 player; no features. SDHC support should be totally standard by now anyway, the darn format has been around for like 3 years.
BTW, if anyone of you have an ebook reader, check out mobileread.com if you haven't already. They have excellent people there and there's a great community effort to post nicely-formatted versions of all the classics up on Project Gutenberg in native reader formats. I was supposed to get something like 100 classics for free from the Sony eBook store, but I didn't bother; it turns out that they're all DRM locked even though they're PD books, and they're not as well formatted as the free ones up on mobileread.
