Out with the old, in with the new

[ellarien]

Today I took my old, thoroughly retired Behemoth laptop back to the store from whence it came, and they gave me nearly $50 in trade-in for it. Which is ... about three per cent of what I paid for it in 2004, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. I feel at least ten pounds lighter with it gone -- it always was an unwieldy lump of a thing, even before it succumbed to WinXP-rot and slowed to a crawl.

Then I put the trade-in gift-card towards a basic e-reader -- a Sony Pocket Edition, which lacks a lot of the bells and whistles of more recent gadgets -- it doesn't have a touch screen or wireless or even an expansion slot, but it works fine for what I want. This way, while my dead trees are in transit I can read without being dependent on the Palm's not-so-great battery.

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[kip-w.livejournal.com]

My Sony Pocket Edition is still working (well, the refurb I got in exchange for my original one is still working, with occasional hints of flakiness). Right after boasting that I still have every book I've downloaded, I learned that the ones I paid for are gone. This is due to the fact that the software for the reader won't work for me any more, and Sony gave up trying to help me. ("We're not the company that does the software." "Well, who is?" silence)

So I'm just putting books in it like it's a hard drive now, and have no plans to pay for any more content for it. I've made good, as best I can, on the books I foolishly shelled out for with replacements from Project Gutenberg and other places (weeks of labor await when I get around to reformatting the original-spelling Shakespeare volumes I got from U of VA: line numbers to strip out, character names to expand, and stuff that's too complex to write about in this margin).

I do a lot of reformatting, because Gutenberg books have returns after every line, making for the sawtooth line lengths. I've worked out a fairly optimal procedure to do a book in a quarter to a third of an hour (if it's not too complex, like a book that alternates prose and verse) from plain text to PDF, but then I still find weirdness like quote marks (single and double) being invisible on screen.

In exchange for the inconvenience, I have a virtual library in my backpack at all times. I'm okay with that.

[ellarien]

I'm finding that Calibre is considerably more useful than the official Sony software for dealing with public-domain and non-DRM stuff. It converts between a wide variety of formats with mostly-decent results, but it won't help with your DRM'd works.

The reader doesn't seem to like my Gutenberg version of the entire KJV Bible, which looks like a memory problem to me, but otherwise it's working nicely so far.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I have had problems with some big files, and I can't predict it. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. Huh.

I went and got Calibre and put it in. Then I edited all the author names and some tags. This was frustrating, as I would double-click the field to highlight it, and it would un-highlight without warning, and then interpret my unfinished typing as a reason to change the field order or scroll up or something. I cursed a lot, and finally adopted the expedient of typing each name in TextEdit and pasting them in, which went a little faster. It didn't do what I expected, which would have been to let me make the changes to my library and then update the Sony from it. I ended up doing everything in bulk, first deleting all the files on the Sony and then uploading them again.

I guess that's about all I needed from the Reader software. I can get Google books from Google, and those were pretty much the only things I got from them for free. Since I've formatted a number of books for the reader, some time I should make a list and send them to folks who might want them.

[ellarien]

Yes, it seems disingenuous of Sony to imply that the Google books are only available through their store! I did sign up because I wanted to treat myself to a couple of new, for-pay books for the trip home. One of them is the new Brandon Sanderson opus, which is an 8Mb file and seems to work fine, so I dunno. Maybe it's the abundance of internal links in the KJV that blows the reader's tiny mind.

I can see myself wiping the reader and starting over with a cleaner set of tags, one of these days, but right now I have more than enough cats to vacuum.