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Sony Reader tips: Web2Book and the landscape mode
July 16, 2007 | 11:52 am
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By David Rothman
If you went for the recent $99 Sony Reader bargain, you may be wondering: “How can my new gizmo display HTML files, including Wikipedia entries? And what about e-books from Project Gutenberg? Or RSS feeds? Or Microsoft LIT files?”
One solution might be a promising but perhaps buggy program called Web2Book. Give it a shot. I’m still breaking in my copy, which crashes. Please note, too, the requirements: Windows XP/Vista, Microsoft .Net Framework. Also, certain functions won’t work without the Tidy program. Anyone got any other conversion-related ideas to share for the Reader? Meanwhile, best of luck to GeekRaver, the developer, and I hope people will help him debug if the fault isn’t at my end.
The Reader’s landscape mode
A separate issue is the display of PDF files and others that could benefit from the landscape mode. When the Reader is positioned horizontally, the small type in many PDFs will grow and not be quite as hard on your eyes. Also, some may prefer the horizontal mode for reading long paragraphs and long sentences.
Unfortunately, however, in the landscape mode, the Reader grays out part of the text—which will appear in black on the next page for real. Some consider that a feature, giving them an idea of what’s ahead. I view it as a bug, whether it is or not. Why can’t Sony let you choose whether you want the gray? Let’s hope that the new model will allow a choice. Meanwhile, in planning their rival machines, perhaps companies such as Bookeen and ETI can consider a toggle, or just plain avoid the gray-text gimmick for the landscape mode. I hope they offer the mode itself, of course.
Related: Taming your $99 Sony Reader: how to make the screen more readable. The trick is to bold an RTF file before feeding it into the Sony Reader’s software. RTF is among Manybooks.net‘s formats for Gutenberg classics.
Web2Book details from Download.com: “This program makes formatted HTML, RTF, LRF or PDF files from RSS feeds, Web sites, Project Gutenberg books, Wikipedia entries, Crossword Compiler crossword, Microsoft Reader .Lit files, and other sources. PDF output is in iso-8859-15 character set, so some European languages are supported. The output files can be saved on your PC or synced directly to the Sony PRS-500 e-Book Reader over USB. Daily updates can be scheduled to make archived copies of websites and RSS feeds.” Also see a helpful MobileRead thread and a list of conversion programs, including some that’ll work with the Reader’s LRF format. Which are worth messing with?
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Comments:
There are a couple of Open Source ways to make custom PDF files from Web pages. I’ve used HTMLDOC and OpenOffice. HTMLDOC does a good job with simple Web pages, and most posted ebooks fall into this category. The biggest problem with HTMLDOC is that it’s wildly out-of-date; in particular it doesn’t support UTF-8 in Web pages. And this situation isn’t likely to improve anytime soon, as the author, Michael Sweet, has been hired by Apple to work on CUPS printing.
Another option is to try to use OpenOffice macros to convert Web pages to PDF. I worked out a macro package to do this; see this post for details. It works better than HTMLDOC for complicated pages, but has its own drawbacks.
I’m surprised that no one has taken the Gecko framework and produced a “print-to-PDF” program for Web pages based on it. Seems to be a need for it.
By the way, as far as I can see, OpenOffice doesn’t use the Mozilla code for rendering HTML. This was an option some folks were looking at, but it never made it into the codebase.