It's great! Though rather awkward to get books onto it, at the moment. It was originally designed to work only with Sony's proprietary BBeB format -- in which they offer a number of titles, for a modest price. The problem with this is that they offered no way to load plain text, html or pdf files onto it, and books purchased in the proprietary format self-destruct after 90 days!
Fortunately some nice fellows on the Internet have determined how to convert text files into the BBeB format, and even Sony has recently gotten into the game by providing a printer driver in which content from any application can be 'printed' directly to the Librie hardware (and converted into BBeB format in the process).
It's a lot easier to lug around than the 900 page hardcover version of the novel I was reading above.
Only a couple weeks late on a reply but - how does it feel to use non-Sony stuff with it? I really want one, but I was worried about books with figures/images and the like. I don't care if it's black and white, but I wonder about the distortion associated with conversion and the like if I'm trying to read a technical book (which is what I usually have in PDF).
There are a couple of drawbacks, currently, to getting non-Sony files onto the thing. There are two ways to do it:
1.) Hackers have written a utility for converting plain .txt files into the Librie's proprietary .lrf format. From what I understand, it works well, though I've not succeeded in converting one myself yet. This method gives you access to all the Librie's special features, like zooming/scaling the text of each page, leaving footnotes, etc.
2.) Sony had made available a printer driver (for Windows only, unfortunately) which can convert any document that can be printed directly to the Librie in .lrf format. Basically you just open up your program and print it to the "Librie" device. Sounds great, right? Well, the drawback is that you need your documents to be optimized to 800x600 prior to printing, because documents converted through this method cannot take advantage of the zooming/scaling feature. Hence 1 page of your file = 1 screenful on the Librie. Generally, I have to increase fonts up to 20-22ppt to make them legible
( ... )
Well I’ve got 2 months to decide if I want it, but they sure do look nice. I’m going to start monitoring the group to see what can be done… I’m mostly a Mac user at the moment so the whole “PC only” thing is irritating.
It sounds like text-only stuff would be nice, but PDFs are not going to work out so well. Maybe I can sneak something into a store to play around with. I know they have a memory stick slot.
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Fortunately some nice fellows on the Internet have determined how to convert text files into the BBeB format, and even Sony has recently gotten into the game by providing a printer driver in which content from any application can be 'printed' directly to the Librie hardware (and converted into BBeB format in the process).
It's a lot easier to lug around than the 900 page hardcover version of the novel I was reading above.
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1.) Hackers have written a utility for converting plain .txt files into the Librie's proprietary .lrf format. From what I understand, it works well, though I've not succeeded in converting one myself yet. This method gives you access to all the Librie's special features, like zooming/scaling the text of each page, leaving footnotes, etc.
2.) Sony had made available a printer driver (for Windows only, unfortunately) which can convert any document that can be printed directly to the Librie in .lrf format. Basically you just open up your program and print it to the "Librie" device. Sounds great, right? Well, the drawback is that you need your documents to be optimized to 800x600 prior to printing, because documents converted through this method cannot take advantage of the zooming/scaling feature. Hence 1 page of your file = 1 screenful on the Librie. Generally, I have to increase fonts up to 20-22ppt to make them legible ( ... )
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It sounds like text-only stuff would be nice, but PDFs are not going to work out so well. Maybe I can sneak something into a store to play around with. I know they have a memory stick slot.
Thanks for sharing ;)
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