Comments on: Sony forced to rethink Librié concept

By: joe

joe — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 12:34:00 +0000

the librie rocks. i’ve uploaded loads of books and manga to it already (i’ve had it 3 days). i convert pdfs to docs or txts before transfer/printing

By: Peter da Silva

Peter da Silva — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:25:01 +0000

That thing is huge. It looks like they decided to make the screen the size of a paperback, so the whole thing’s almost the size of a hardcover book. It’s slim, yes, but way too big to stick in my pocket.

I’ll stay with my old Clie SJ22, it’s got a color screen, it’s readable in sunlight or in the dark, and I can stick it in my pocket without worrying about snapping it in half when I sit down.

Ian: buy a PalmOS device (there’s a very nice Clie with a half-VGA screen you can buy cheaply, now that Sony’s pulled out of the market), get a copy of Mobipocket Reader and Plucker, and cancel your subscriptions…

I wonder if this is part of the reason Sony pulled the Clie from international distribution. If so, they pulled a typical Sony move with this thing.

By: Albert

Albert — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 08:46:41 +0000

This post has been referenced at http://www.canalpda.com/displayarticle234.html

By: macewan

macewan — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 02:31:38 +0000

If I could convert pdf’s from Linux it might be worth it.

By: Ian Cottee

Ian Cottee — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 23:17:23 +0000

This is one of the few things in the world of tech that makes me so bloody angry at the moment. What the hell Sony were thinking of is beyond me and I can only assume they were under pressure to cripple the product in some way for fear of more traditional publications being hit.

If there was a simple sync of common data formats to Librie via Mac and Windows this thing would fly off the shelves. I’d buy one straight off and cancel my bloody newspaper subscription. And therein may lie the problem.

By: Andreas

Andreas — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 13:38:59 +0000

Richard, according to Librie Templates, "Newspaper for Libri&é" and "Toolbar for Libri&é" convert RSS items resp. (X)HTML documents into BBeB text. The "Printer for Libri&é" tool converts PDF, Word, etc. documents into a BBeB image, thus not allowing text-zoom functionality and the like.

By: Richard Soderberg

Richard Soderberg — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 04:11:46 +0000

Does the newly released toolset transfer the data as text or as images?

By: Andreas

Andreas — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 04:18:37 +0000

The Matt, thanks for that link. :-)
Justin, the newly released Libri&é toolset exactly allows you to transfer your own data to the device.

By: The Matt

The Matt — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 01:35:22 +0000

Andreas (and Justin), have you looked at the Librie group at Yahoo!? Link:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/librie/

They’ve had a utility that allows uploading of Project Gutenberg books for a while. It is a C program so it should be viable on LInux (although most successful use has been on Windows). They are also looking at the firmware upgrade right now.

By: Justin Mason

Justin Mason — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 01:29:34 +0000

So you still need to run Windows and IE to do that conversion, then, I presume? That’s *halfway* to useful…

Oh well. here’s hoping someone reverse-engineers enough of the protocol eventually, so that plain XHTML can be converted and uploaded to the Librie — then it’ll be useful. That hardware *does* look very nice indeed, but without a way to get *my* data onto it, it’ll remain useless and off my wish-list ;)

(aside: this is typical Sony; copy-protection defeating usefulness, resulting in a useless product. Here’s a story about that — I made a terrible mistake a few months ago of buying a Sony DVD+/-R/RW burner. I’d bought a Sony digital camera and had great results, with it producing open-standards output and just working with my Linux desktop, and assumed the DVD burner would be similar. Of course, I was wrong; the burner doesn’t allow you to do useful stuff like set the DVD “book type” bits, so the disks I burn for backups aren’t readable on many DVD-reader drives!)