No joy copying Ebooks to Psion?

[nigelp]

Following on from previous postings I have downloaded two E book 'readers' Tomeraider and Pdbread as they seemed to support a lot of good stuff. All well and good until I tried to Copy/convert the books from the computer to the Psion. Have tried all methods but no joy does anyone use these and let me know what they do to transfer the books to the psion? PLEASE am dying to try these out? :confused: Thanks Nigel

[MikeMcC]

All well and good until I tried to Copy/convert the books from the computer to the Psion. I still don't understand what you are trying to convert and how you expect this to be achieved.

PsiWin isn't going to convert what is to it a totally unknown file format. PsiWin only converts the file types that it was originally written to convert - and that certainly isn't your "English Literature" :)

[nigelp]

Even just copying does not work? If the format the books are in will not go over to the Psion how do you read them? I believe the pbd file is a palm one but assumed the reader installed on the psion would sort this?

[MikeMcC]

Even just copying does not work? This I simply cannot understand. PsiWin cannot select which files it will or won't copy. Can you email me a copy of one of these files you cannot copy? You will have to go to my website and click on the button to email me, because I have disabled email directly from these forums.

[netBookBabe]

Nigel

I can't help thinking you are making this more complicated than it is - I'm as baffled as Mike is.

Let's take TomeRaider as a starting point. Assuming you already have TR installed on the Psion, then download your chosen text in TR format to PC. Connect up via PsiWin, then simply drag and drop, or copy and paste, to the appropriate drive and directory on the Psion. No conversion necessary - the file is already in the correct format.

From there, just double-tapping on the filename on the Psion will start up TomeRaider and you can read the text.

Does that not work? :confused:

Julie

[nigelp]

Well thats very strange. I had all the books on my 'E: drive' along with all the Psion goodies i have downloaded and usually just transfer to psion from there, what i did as an experiment was to put two books in the 'C:...documents folder' and when I transfered from that the whole process has worked fine?? Whats the difference? So have looked at one and am still experimenting with the Tomeraider one as cant actually access the file yet from the psion but at least its there!! Thanks alot and bet Mikes transferred his copy too!!

[MikeMcC]

Thanks alot and bet Mikes transferred his copy too!! Yes, the file copied across from PC to Psion without a problem (although your filename has two dots before the extension!).

[nigelp]

Would it make a difference if the drive I installed the zipped files to is the same as the one I unzipped onto? Am using 'freezip'?

[nigelp]

Tomeraider dont offer a nice demo version to look at so will have to buy and try!! The PbdRead works fine now!!

[MikeMcC]

Originally posted by nigelp
Would it make a difference if the drive I installed the zipped files to is the same as the one I unzipped onto? Am using 'freezip'? I don't understand the question - you cannot install a zip file anywhere. A zip file is an archive in which other files have been placed, usually in a compressed form. The files have to be extracted from the zip archive before you can do anything with them and it doesn't matter where the zip file is located.

[diem]

Hi Nigel,

I'm wondering if part of your problem is that you are under the misapprehension that 'ebook' implies a specific file format?

TomeRaider uses its own proprietary format, so it will not read Palm PDB files (nor anything else except TR1 and TR2 files!) and you are therefore locked into using their format (and therefore buying your books from thier sources!). The same is true of Microsoft Reader on PocketPC.

The Aportis/Palm format, PDB (also PRC) is the most open and versatile, since there is a freeware tool to convert raw text files into this format. Thus there is a wide range of free ebooks out there in this format.

As I mentioned before, I will soon have a howto guide for doing all of this in my FAQ - hopefully I'll write it this weekend!

As Mike and Julie have attempted to tell you, Psiwin cannot be used to 'convert' files of any given ebook format into one that can be read by any given ebook reading software. You must either obtain the file in the format that your chosen software needs, or use a specific program on your Psion to do the conversion.

Hope this helps.

[nigelp]

Thanks. Sorry should have said downloaded to rather than installed, the files downloaded to the 'disc' in zip format and then unzipped there are the ones that dont work? If I choose a 'unzip' folder in say my documents then it copys across fine, noticed also that the 'double dots' in the file name then dissapear also. So far both mobipocket reader and pdbread work ok. Thanks again Ill try to find some thing else to bother you with!!!!