EBook
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iRex Iliad Overview
I've just recently purchased an iRex iLiad with a larger screen than the Sony and an open software for development. It also has a Wacom digitizer, ethernet, WiFi, USB host and thingy, and runs ssh. The build quality isn't as nice as Sony's metal case, but the extra features make it into a real computer. The 2.9.1 firmware officially is usable for development, but iRex takes a few weeks to get the development image to you. Instead I had to hack mine through the built in Mozilla browser to be able to install my own programs.
Sony PRS-500 Overview
The Sony PRS500 Reader is an amazing product. The electronic ink screen is like nothing I have ever seen -- it really has no glare, lighting or off-angle issues. I'm amazed at how well it displays text and some images. The closest analogy I can come up with is an Etcha-Sketch; sort of a fine grain with a newsprint gray background. More details on the device from MobileRead.
However, it doesn't have any Linux support out of the box, so I wrote a few tools to create PDF documents. The PDF reader onboard doesn't zoom very well, so the font and page size need to be gigantic. The table of contents system works fairly well with PDF TOC entries and it uses the PDF meta data in the info dictionary for title/author display.
The device has been popular with Makers and early adopters; I don't know how well it will go over with the general public. From what I've read, the Windows software isn't that great, but I haven't tried it -- I don't have a win32 system to test it on. Instead, I've written my own conversion tools.
For pre-formatted books, FeedBooks takes Project Gutenberg files and makes them usable on the reader. They aren't 100% perfect, but they work.
In recent days a formatting tool for the PRS-500 was launched to the market. It is the only tool available today that can format your existing e-books to fit the screen of your Sony PRS-500 so you can read them effortlessly. In the past, letter-sized e-books that were loaded to the PRS-500 could be barely read. This tool can be found on the following address: PRS-500 Formatter. This auto-formatting software will certainly expand the capabilities of the Sony PRS-500 as it will give its users the possibility of creating their own fully compatible e-books out of their existing ones.
Commercial eBooks can be summed up by this definition:
E-book (electronic book): The publishing format that has the highest ratio of “time spent discussing it in meetings” to “copies sold.” Authors fondly believe that tens of thousands of readers who’ve passed up the opportunity to buy attractive, inexpensive hardcopy editions of their works will nevertheless go to great effort to illegally download wonky, badly formatted e-texts of the same books in order to read them in Courier on their computer screens.
Linux Interfacing
Use the libprs500 Python library and command line tool. It isn't pretty, but it works. Unfortunately it depends on Python 2.5 and lots of other, newer libraries, so I had to upgrade my FC4 system. Hopefully I didn't break anything else along the way.
Also of use is documentation on the internals of the Sony PRS500 filesystem and Linux system.
LaTeX Style
To generate my own documents, I use a LaTeX formating with a small page (A6 paper) with a large font and minimal borders. I use the hyperref package for making the table of contents entires; you may have to run pdflatex twice to generate all the cross references corretly. The optional fncychap LaTeX package gives us the nice borders on chapter headings.
As an example of a lengthy work formatted with this style, here is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (600 KB PDF), a CC licensed work by Cory Doctorow.
\documentclass[11pt,openany]{book}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\usepackage{times}
\usepackage[
paperwidth=92mm,
paperheight=117mm,
vcentering,
top=6mm,
bottom=3pt,
left=2mm,
right=2mm,
headsep=2mm
]{geometry}
\usepackage[Lenny]{fncychap}
\begin{document}
\title{...}
\author{...}
\pdfinfo {
/Title (\title)
/Author (\author)
/CreationDate (\date)
}
....
\end{document}
rss2pdf
From what I have read, the Sony RSS support is very broken. Since I can't run their software anyway, I wrote my own using a variety of Perl classes (XML::RSS::Parser and HTML::Latex). The rss2pdf script creates a LaTeX document from RSS feeds with a chapter per feed and a section per post. The table of contents is generated and works with the TOC browser in the reader.
It has some problems on blogspot atom.xml feeds for some reason. I haven't debugged it yet.
To update the PDF metadata on existing PDF documents, I wrote pdf-meta using the PDF::API2 class.
bloglines2pdf
Using the Bloglines:getitems API, I was able to access my bloglines feeds and generate a single PDF from all of them. Unfortunately the XML::RSS::Parser and XML::RSS:Parser::Lite choke on feeds with multiple channels. So, against the best recommendations of everyone, I use a regular expression to split it into separate channels and generate fake feeds for each blog. This is the one that I use the most. Full source for bloglines2pdf
wp2pdf / slate2pdf
I'm not releasing these yet. They use the same sort of infrastructure as the other tools to scrape the entire Washington Post and Slate Magazine websites to generate books. Each chapter is a section of the WP from their RSS feed and each article is a section. This works out really well, but it's not clear if this is within their terms of use.
Image gallery
Sony Reader closeup |
 Sony Reader full screen |
 Sony Reader in use |
End notes
Hudson 18:41, 9 January 2007 (EST)