How to reformat tech books for use on Sony reader

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LesF

171 posts

Master Geek

#111110 24-Oct-2012 12:18

I have a Sony reader which I am generally happy with, for novels and such.

I have bought some technical programming books recently, which use a lot of example code, presumably in some kind of block-quote format. These sections of text do not wrap but disapear off to the side. I partial solution is to switch to landscape but even then some long code examples will run off the side.

The ebooks I have purchased are DRM free epubs. Is there a reformatter I could use to change the styles used in example code? Not my preferred solution as I would rather not mess with the ebook files.

Just wondering if it is worth attempting to root my Sony reader and install alternative reader apps. Has anybody done this and are there better options to the default reader app?

John2010

532 posts

Ultimate Geek

#705704 24-Oct-2012 14:02

Do they wrap correctly in Adobe Digital Editions, which is really the standard for epub readers?

If they do not then I suspect there is not much you can do about it except to dive into the epub's constituent files and correct the formatting. Other readers may work but it would be the luck of the draw.

Personally, I would not recommend rooting your reader.

To modify the files, where to head is to Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/, and to get more adventurous to Sigil http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ (the latest Beta is pretty stable and much more feature rich, enough for me to be happy using it, else revert to the last stable version). These are quite easy to use once one has spent a little time getting to grips with them - if you have any html experience you will find Sigil easy from the start as epubs are essentially a bunch of zipped up html files and very easy to work with.

You may find it more helpful to raise your question at http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=100 first, there are also Calibre and Sigil forums at the same site. There are plenty of very helpful people there including the ones who develop Calibre and Sigil, and others that format epubs for a living.

If you do decide to look at Calibre I won't get into messy details, but if you are super lucky you may find just doing a conversion of the troublesome books from epub to epub may just fix the problem, but I would suggest going to the mobileread forums first as a same to same conversion is a bit of a dodge.