I love Tuesdays because that means that Rainbow eBooks has a sale on all of their new releases, which mine happens to be, new that is and on sale at 15% off. It’s regularly $6.99, but you can buy it today for only $5.94.
If you have a Nook just download the epub file, if you have a Kindle, download the mobi file. If you don’t have an ebook reader then you can download any file, mobi, epub or pdf. They all work with PC if you have a PC ebook reader.
I was watching Attack of the Show today and they spoke for 10 seconds about Borders filing for chapter 11 and closing some of their famous book stores but they didn’t go into as much detail as this email that I got today did.
Click the image to see it full sized to read the sad news.
My guess, and this is just an uneducated guess, is that they are doing poorly because of the rise of eBooks via the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook. Borders does sell their own eBook reader called the Kobo as well as many other e-book readers like the Sony and Velocity Micro Cruz (which I have never heard of).
The main reason I bought a Nook was because of its online store ability as well as it’s ability to allow me to upload epub files from other websites which the Kindle would not allow. The Kobo and Sony readers were in my pro and con list but unfortunately didn’t meet my criteria due to the lack of an online store which I’m finding out now that the Kobo has. I don’t think it had it when I was making my decision.
Well as far as I knew they were doing great because we’ve been to the Borders over on Stockdale Hwy here in Bakersfield and they are always busy, then again it could’ve been that day but who knows. I’m almost positive that this is just a temporary economical setback and that they will eventually recover from it and be as strong as they always have been because they are a great store to go in to.
It is sad news to hear because I love to read and I think it’s very important for parents to teach their kids the joy of reading at an early age so they enjoy reading in their child, teen and adult years as much as I love to read today. Maybe knowing that they aren’t doing so great people will make the trip to their local Borders store hoping for a sale which might end up boosting their business causing the opposite of what is happening now.
Don’t let your local Borders store go out of business, go shop there for some books, movies, video games, toys and whatever else they sell. Install the Borders app on your cell phone and start buying e-books from them too. Show them that you want them to stay by giving them some sales and keep those people from being out of a job. Times are tough and the last thing we need is for more people out of work.
I’ve finally figured out how to turn my PSP into an eBook reader. I’ve googled the term “PSPebook reader” before with bad results. You know, those homebrew programs. Yeah, that’s a bad result. I refuse to brick up my PSP just so I can see if I can read an e-book on it.
In my google search I did find a message board where they talked about a PSP e-book reader so I checked out a couple of ideas, this is one of them.
NIMS PSP Ebook Reader . This is a little different although not quite better. If you google the title you may find that it is found in homebrew websites. However, it does not need a homebrewed PSP to work. It does work with a regular PSP because all you are doing is loading an html file in your web browser as your reader then putting your e-book files in another folder.
It has a dos program that you run where it will convert PDF files. I tried it and the output was terrible. It wasn’t what I had hoped it would have been. It’s supposed to convert your pdf e-book file into html files along with some other files I don’t know. Anyway, it wasn’t good.
I did take their index file though and made my own little version of an e-book reader. I changed the text and gave it a background so it looks snazzy but it works better.
Ok here is what you do. File: PSP_ebook.zip This is safe, scan the file with your virus software, all it is, is a zip file with 2 files in it. 1) index.html file and 2) the background image. You unzip the files and put them in your PSP in the folder – PSP/books. You have to create that books folder. I did that to make it easier to find the file in your browser so you don’t have to type too much to find it.
When you buy ebooks you might be able to buy them in pdf format, if you can here is a sweet utility that will convert them to html. If the e-book store offers an html version then all the better for you because you won’t have to worry about converting anything.
When you have your html files of your ebooks you put them in your PSP in the folder – PSP/COMMON/books. You will have to create that books folder. When you open an e-book file you cannot choose to find them in the same location as the index file, they have to be in a higher folder like Common.
Now here is what you do. Go into the browser of your PSP, type this in the address bar:
file:/PSP/books/index.html
Now bookmark that so you don’t have to type it in every time. Now just click Browse, scroll down to /PSP/COMMON/books and click that then find the name of the book you uploaded into the PSP and click it and viola, your PSP is now an e-book reader.
There is a downside, you won’t be able to bookmark at all. Fortunately when you leave the browser, once you go back into it you will be right back where you left off. That is if you didn’t load an actual website which would close the point you stopped reading. If you did that then you would have to scroll down to where you left off at.
If your PDF had chapters with links then you can use those links to find the chapter you were on.
I give the NIMS program a 1 out of 5 for the fact that the e-book I chose to convert looked terrible as an e-book in my PSP. I give my conversion of their program a 4 out of 5 because it has no bookmarking ability but it works better than their idea.
I’ve finally figured out how to turn my PSP into an eBook reader. I’ve googled the term “PSP e-book reader” before with bad results. You know, those homebrew programs. Yeah, that’s a bad result. I refuse to brick up my PSP just so I can see if I can read an ebook on it.
In my google search I did find a message board where they talked about a PSP e-book reader so I checked out a couple of ideas, this is one of them.
“ PSP eBook Creator ” which is actually not a bad program. What you do is click File then open a “.txt” file, you can change it from portrait to landscape, change the background color or give it an image, change the text color, change the font, font size and make it bold or regular then create an output folder then build your e-book files. Once all the images are made all you need to do is upload the folder to your PSP Picture folder, turn it on and start reading.
What it does though is it creates an image for every page of the e-book . If this is a long e-book, this process will take a long time and the size of the entire book might be huge especially if you are running low on space. Not to mention that you won’t have a book cover image to look at since all the files were taken from a text file.
Since it only uses text files you will have to figure out a way to convert your e-book to text format with Calibre.
Here is a sample of what one of the pages will look like in text format as a .jpg file.
It’s not a bad image to look at although you will see some boxes here and there (as seen before Cover Photo Credit…). I read this book from beginning to end last night on my PSP just to see if it would hurt my eyes at all and even though it’s not that long of a book my eyes were ok for a while. But if it were a 400 page novel I’m sure that reading on a PSP would start to hurt your eyes after an hour unlike e-Ink.
If I were to make some changes to make it easier on the eyes I would probably put in a dark background image, make the text white, bold and bigger. For this test I made the font Comic Sans regular size 12. Default is regular (non bold), size 10 but I don’t know what the default font is.
You don’t have to worry about a bookmark since all you have to do is leave the image part of the PSP. Once you go back into it you will be right back on the last page (or image) you were on. That is unless you turned the PSP all the way off, then you would have to find where you were again.
If I were to give this a rating I would give it a 3 out of 5.
Xanapus` Lair 