Obligatory Introduction Post

[elf]

(No, this isn't efw. Really.)

I've been actively reading ebooks on mobile devices for over three years now. I started on a Clié, which I loved and would still be using if all three of the ones I owned hadn't died. Sony no longer supports it--hadn't supported it for a few years when I first got one--and I collected, and killed, three of them before I gave up on the device. (One dead screen, two with unfixable battery issues.) I wanted to upgrade to a new, better PDA but couldn't wade through the sales hype to figure out which of the eleventy-frak available versions were good ebook readers. They all held the software, but not all were physically designed for easy ebook use--or more importantly, weren't designed for easy ebook use by me.

And I'd been looking more and more at that "e-Ink" stuff, and whined at my husband about my dead Cliés until he bought me a Sony PRS-505. (He said "$300 limit; get whichever one you like." I went crazy reading review sites for a couple of days, and settled on the one that seemed to work best for me.) The PRS wasn't my first choice; the Hanlin was--but I couldn't find out if that was supported in the States at all, and it seemed to be risky for that reason. And it was a very very close choice.

I knew I didn't want a Kindle, because I didn't want to be tied to Amazon for doc conversion; I don't want to email my content to someone else in order to read it. Also, I never quite clicked with the .mobi format; I was fond of ereader. Couldn't afford an iRex, so its features were irrelevant. And I picked the 505 over the 700 for battery life & screen clarity. I've had it for almost six months, and I love it. I take it everywhere, and I read on it constantly. I ignore the Sony store, use Calibre for doc conversion (when I don't use Word to make weird-sized PDFs), and maybe someday I'll figure out that hack that makes the book titles all the same point size in the menus.

Comments

[cyprinella]

You know what I wish the Sony did? Show the authors names with the titles when you're viewing by date. I was browsing through last night and couldn't remember which of a couple of similarly titled books I had read already because there weren't author names. Otherwise, I really love it. I do the same thing you do with Calibre, although I convert to LRF because I just am not happy with the way pdfs look on the thing. But I've been a pdf hater for a while.

[elf]

I've worked with PDFs professionally for almost 10 years now; I don't expect anyone to share my obsession with them. I'm fairly quick at setting Word docs to Sony Reader-sized pages, 9pt font, .15" borders, 6pts between paragraphs, so they don't need to reflow when they get there. (Other people would use 10-12-pt fonts. I'll occasionally read letter-sized PDFs without resizing; I prefer smaller text.) Also, I'm pants at working with html, so PDFs are my only way to include images on the few times that matters.

I keep thinking about installing the hack software that lets you customize the Reader interface; I'd love it to have a clock, and have more control over what shows in the various searches. I hate that author doesn't show when viewing by date; I never need to know the exact date I uploaded something, just the order.

And I hate that, after starting to read something sorted by date, if I use the "menu" button to back up, it'll go back to the *author* menu instead of the date menu. Bleh.

Calibre's wonderful, and I need to figure out more of how it works. (Like how to get chapter breaks. I need the newer version, which I haven't downloaded yet, and then need to figure out how to make it recognize chapters. Lack of skill there is probably my #1 reason for making PDFs--I can add bookmarks to PDFs, which translate to a TOC in the Reader.)

[amalthia]

I'm slowly but surely learning how to add chapter breaks into the html files I'm making so it's less work. Basically, learning more about Calibre and trying to get it to do most of the work.

I also would love to see author name when sorting by date.