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[Atari2600]

I was going to buy an e-book and use it with the PSP, but I have a few questions.

Is there another way to read them on the PSP other than the what appears to be cumbersome method of using that print program to convert them to JPEGS? I have searched around and didn't find anything. I also looked around pspupdates, but that site's not great for searching.

Is it even worth doing? I'd be reading just a regular book, not comics, so I'd just be looking at text. Will I go insane looking at the screen reading tiny words for that long? The file size, at least using the one program I saw could be 130+ megs, which is pretty huge, so I'm not sure if it's worth the effort.

 

[OniShiro]

there are a few homebrew text readers for the PSP, I remember CNReader and Aozora, there's another one I don't remember.

They are ok, but nothing special yet, no font customization which is a must for me.

 

[Gattsu25]

depends on the format of the book...there are tools out there that can convert e-Books to .txt files (google convert .xyz .txt where .xyz is the file format of the book)

this causes some errors in formatting (which can be fixed with masterful use of a text editor's replace tool), but at the same time, the books will only take up less than 2meg on the MS

CN.Reader would be perfect if it allowed for 100% english characters (as it is, some words are rendered illegible because of random chinese symbols that replace some characters) and supported the RTF file format...dunno...maybe a newer version supports that...haven't upgraded anything on teh old PSP since I got Untold Legends :b

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

I don't find reading the text to be a problem. CN Reader is my favorite of the bunch currently, though it has some things to dislike, such as it constantly splitting words up between lines.

It should also be noted that if you're buying the ebook, I'd guess it's not in a straight text format. In which case you'll still need to copy/paste all the text if that works well, or find a converter.

 

[Gattsu25]

[CN] constantly splitting words up between lines.

there is a freeware program that can allieviate this...I'VE HEARD (haven't tested it yet)

TIP:
To get around the bad word wrapping, you have to word wrap your text files manually. This can be done using Notepad2 which is freeware and can be downloaded from http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

Open the .txt file in Notepad2. Click "View" - "Long Line Settings..." and type 60 and click OK. Then resize the windows width to the gray line. Hit ctrl-A to select all the text, then hit ctrl-I about 10 or so times to fit all the text into the window. Finally, save the file and load it up in CN. Reader.

Taken from CN.Reader 1.0e1's readme (english port (GUI only) which I haven't installed yet)

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

CN.Reader would be perfect if it allowed for 100% english characters (as it is, some words are rendered illegible because of random chinese symbols that replace some characters)

As you say, this takes "masterful use of a text editor's replace tool". Like I replaced “ and ” with " and there went one big chunk. Also ‘ and ´ with '. At least the characters stopped popping up in the middle of words for me, then.

There isn't really a new version of CN Reader out, but there has been an English translation of the existing version, so learning the menu options will be less of an adventure.

 

[Atari2600]

Thanks for the help so far. I think I'll find a freebie book and try it to see how well it works and if it's something I think I'd do a lot. Any other input or solutions are appreciated.

 

[Gattsu25]

Thanks for the help so far. I think I'll find a freebie book and try it to see how well it works and if it's something I think I'd do a lot. Any other input or solutions are appreciated.

I remember seeing (in the OT) that War of the Worlds is considered public domain...hold on

http://ga-forum.com/showpost.php?p=1576908&postcount=126
Using this link you can get the original War of the Worlds and using the site in the link you can prolly get other books considered Public Domain (right click >> save on one of the Plain text / us-ascii / none links)

 

[Atari2600]

Groovy! Thanks

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

Yeah, there's plenty of interesting old stuff available through Project Gutenberg... but again some processing before hitting the PSP is recommended. :lol You can get books in plain text there, but everything is made to fit in lines of a fixed number of characters, so unless you do something to change that it comes out pretty bad with anything that has lines longer or shorter than that... moreso the shorter, because then every other line will end up really short or something like that.

Here's a paste of the intro/disclaimer text from one release:

This is a preliminary release and will be proofread again, then
the illustrations shall be added. There are several version in
various Etexts formats previously released, but none of them is
in copyright clearance files. We would be happy to clear them,
if the authors would fax or mail us copies of the title pages--
AND the verso [where they copyright information, if any, should
be placed]. Proofreaders, please contact us for edition info.

 

[OniShiro]

Pixie E-book reader for PSP just came out.

This was earlier a GBA/DS project, but it's now also ported to PSP.

Reads TXT, simple PDB and BOOK (which is converted from HTML with included converter.

This is the first released version so there are bugs. Feel free to comment in this thread on how it works.

You can get it from here

Hope it's ok to post the link, otherwise, please remove it.

 

[Gattsu25]

looks kickass

does it support RTF? :b

 

[OniShiro]

Haven't tested it yet, but I guess not, it says it supports plain text, plain PDB and converted HTML files.

It says that in a future version he'll release a font converter from TTF to the font format the program uses, can't wait.

This is an E-book reader for PSP. It handles plain text, plain PDB
(Palm Doc) files and "book"-files. Book files are converted from
HTML with an included commandline tool.

The first time Pixie is run it saves "reader.cfg" in your PIXIE
directory with default settings. You can change these with a
text editor. You can change margins and linespacing to fit your
needs, and also set ROTATION=1 to flip the display 90 degrees
(If you do that you will probably want to use ALIGN=left instead
of ALIGN=justified since the latter only looks good if the display
is wide enough).

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

No RTF support, but it does look like CN Reader finally has some competition. I just put my first impressions in the PSP 1.50 sticky. I'll probably switch to using this reader for now, but eventually we should get a text reader with the things I like about both Pixie and CN Reader.

 

[Atari2600]

I used CN Reader today and it wasn't too bad. I tried to edit the files in Notepad 2, but it didn't work perfectly. Even with the random chinese characters (seemed to mostly be letter with accents over them) it was very readable. I am not sure if I'll want to read a whole book this way, because most of the reading I do is on flights when I can't use electronics, but it's not too shabby.

 

[bionic77]

I was going to buy an e-book and use it with the PSP, but I have a few questions.

Is there another way to read them on the PSP other than the what appears to be cumbersome method of using that print program to convert them to JPEGS? I have searched around and didn't find anything. I also looked around pspupdates, but that site's not great for searching.

Is it even worth doing? I'd be reading just a regular book, not comics, so I'd just be looking at text. Will I go insane looking at the screen reading tiny words for that long? The file size, at least using the one program I saw could be 130+ megs, which is pretty huge, so I'm not sure if it's worth the effort.

I can't speak for how to make this work on the PSP, but ebooks are the coolest thing ever and they shouldn't take up that much space. It is just so cool to be able to take that many books around with you all the time. I really wish publishers would get behind this format and start marketing it right. This is the main use behind my Dell Axim x50v. I don't know if PSP supports it, but I really like the MS book reader. Also, I could be wrong but I think Adobe totally dropped support of ebooks.

The only downside is that most books don't seem to get published in a legitimate ebook format, though they can still be found...

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

I can't speak for how to make this work on the PSP, but ebooks are the coolest thing ever and they shouldn't take up that much space.

I was a bit confused about this at first, too. However, there are programs out there to basically print a book into a load of 480x272 JPEG images for reading on the PSP, which of course makes things balloon in size.

 

[Forsete]

Any of you got the convert.exe to work from that Pixie program?

First it said msvcp80.dll was missing, so I downloaded that.. Then it said msvcr80.dll and now I have that.. Now its complaining about this: Cant find __CxxFrameHandler3 in DLL-file MSVCR80.dll :/

EDIT: Beta version out already? Trying now. Works!