Rather than using the software supplied by Sony, I’ve been using the free open source tool Calibre to manage my books from the start. It’s a python tool that runs on windows and linux. It takes only a short time to get used to it, and it can be used to convert ebooks of many different formats into Sony’s LRF format. You can manage all the books you have in your library and update content to your Ereader. In addition to all that there are also options for pulling content from websites and converting those into a readable format offline.

When it came to actually making small edits to books I spent some time looking at PDF editors before realising that I could skip the PDFs altogether and start with the LRF file. As part of the Calibre install you already get a bunch of conversion tools. The useful ones in this case are lrf2lrs and lrs2lrf. While LRF is a binary format that isn’t editable, lrs is an xml version that is. You can simply open a command prompt and use lrf2lrs book.lrf to convert your book to a book.lrs file. You can open this in a normal text editor to fix any typos. When you’ve updated the lrs file, just use lrs2lrf book.lrs to update book.lrf with your changes. Simple as that! You can do more complicated editing of the lrs file including the table of contents, but it does mean getting very familiar with the lrs format. More on that another time.

You can also edit the metadata for each book in Calibre. You need to be careful that you don’t lose those changes if you decide to backup and restore your calibre library though as the metadata in the LRF files themselves does not get updated. If you just copy the folders containing the books and reimport them, you’ll lose any metadata changes. You need to choose the “Save to disk” option which will copy the folders, lrf files and also create an opf file in each folder. When you reimport these folders the updated metadata will be retained.

The Ereader itself is a lovely piece of work.  The Eink technology works really well.  As a voracious reader I’ve had no trouble switching to the electronic format of my favourite books.  Yes, the page turns may be a little slow… but overall it’s easy to read material on, and for someone who reads quite fast – the benefits of carrying one light slim book instead hauling around paperbacks (or even worse, hardbacks) are immeasurable.

I’m rapidly rediscovering many favourite authors of my youth thanks to the device.  I’d never have the space to store so many books so it’s nice to be able to start building a collection.  It will really come into its own later in the year with a planned 3 month trip where I’ll want to be travelling light.  For someone who would class themselves as a slow reader, this may not be worth the purchase… but if you’re like me and have been a frequent visitor to the library you’ll find it great for helping you keep enough reading material on hand.

I’m still hoping that as ereaders become more mainstream, kindle content will eventually be easily available for porting to the Ereader (even in Europe) and I’ll have the best of both worlds.  One thing’s for sure… Amazon do not know how to design an attractive device.  It would be better all round if they focused on providing the content instead.