PRS 600

[bobt]

Should have my hands on this beauty in September when my wife gets back, was wondering if anyone had any experiences or heads up on this unit. I have tons of stuff on the puter, mostly .dc and PDF, has anyone had issues?

Thanks

Bob

[sfbp]

The main issues I had were nothing to do with the PRS600. The problem came when trying to convert some of the old books (things like Shakespeare, Jungle Book, Gibbon, etc) from other sources. The resulting format was lousy and in one case crashed the converter outright.

But that's not Sony's fault.

Another (silly) issue I had was losing authorization on a library book which I had checked out (Adobe digital editions). Something seems to deauthorize it at random. Haven't worked out what yet. Moving it around, possibly.

You want to be careful with the Sync options so you understand what it's doing, as you may end up with too many copies filling up the memories of the device and SD card.

One thing, an 8GB card is plenty - Flash seems to have gotten expensive unless you are lucky. And it refused to use the 32GB card I have (16GB is ok).

Strongly recommend one of the rubber sheaths to stop it getting scratches on the metal case. The unit is waaaay too pretty for that.

Stephen

[bobt]

From what I gather it's coming with a book like cover, not sure if wife got any memory, have a few 1 gig cards around, too bad it doesn't take minidisc, got lots of those! Can I transfer onto card and have Sony read it, or does it have to go through sonyfication first

[sfbp]

As long as its one of the formats Sony can read, no problem. Nice to put it in the "right" dir but you'll quickly figure that out. The only tricky one is DRM-protected pdf. Somehow it has to get authorized (via the authorization on the device) and that's when I seem to lose it sometimes. Epub is basically the reader's native format. But I think LRF (can't recall if that's Sony's own) also native.

Amazon->Epub, you need some help, but it exists. Basically you get Kindle-for-Whatever (PC,Mac,Ipad) and then convert it.

The Sony's own software works, but so does an open software called Calibre, which was actually written FOR the Sony (and recognizes both the Sony's slots as well). 350MB is a fair bit (the native memory) until you break down and want to put music (MP3, sigh) in there too. So a card is nice.

[bobt]

Had it a while now, love it, Reader is crap, still can't figure out how to import, so far have been dragging books onto the card, seems to work ok, have had to use calibre on a couple of books, only thing it doesn't like is the combination of direct sun and head when I was trying to read by the pool in Varadero

[sfbp]

Yeah you will be fine.. until you get some protected book (eg from a public library) that you cannot remove the DRM from, such as an Adobe-protected PDF or Epub. When you get to that point, holler and I will tell you the trick. It's a bit subtle.

Just one word of advice (this required hours of shouting on the phone to divine this information). When you sign up for Reader (the Sony Store) you make a password. THIS PASSWORD IS ALSO YOUR ADOBE PASSWORD. If you also sign up for an account by going to the adobe web site, everything goes to r*tsh*t and you will have to beg Adobe on bended knees to merge the two accounts or delete one of them and set the password to something known so you can change it to match the one for the reader store.

If you did as I did, the two password thing gets you books which simply expire randomly, and an application on the PC that spends its whole time trying to validate your DRM. This actually brought my laptop crashing to halt effectively. Maybe that's what's happening to you.

Stephen

[bobt]

It won't accept my validation because it was hooked up to another computer before mine, so far it is working ok as I don't buy books, most of mine are public domain or do not have DRM