EBook – OSR – RSS feeds on the Sony Reader

Craft & Design
EBook – OSR – RSS feeds on the Sony Reader

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Trammell writes –

“I bought one of the Sony eBook readers and wanted a way to read my blogs and other documents offline. So I wrote a tool using a variety of Perl modules to transform RSS feeds into LaTeX and a style sheet to make it formatted for the small screen.”Link.

Related:

  • Sony Reader Internals 2.0 (pics!) – Link.
  • MAKE on the new Sony PRS-500 e-ink/ebook reader – Link.
  • Sony responds to our Sony Reader questions— – Link.

8 thoughts on “EBook – OSR – RSS feeds on the Sony Reader

  1. adricm says:

    Nice hack Tramm! when i find spare time i may have to see about picking one of these up.

  2. RTourn says:

    I love the reader, I just hate their software. Thanks Trammell.

  3. rdarlington says:

    I’ve been fighting with Sony over obtaining some information. Apparently they feel the dimensions of the eInk display are proprietary and have so far refused to give me anything. They have no developer program and they are somewhat hostile toward individuals contacting them in regards to publishing information formatted for the display. After several e-mails and phone calls, I have one guy in their publishing sign up department supposedly going to call me back sometime this week to discuss my needs.

    Of course, I’m being a bastard because all of the info I need is available from eInk.com ;) Then again, I’m not 100% sure their panel w/ the dev kit is identical to the one in use in the PRS-500.

    I own one of these devices and love it, but Sony sure doesn’t seem to want to help people get their own documentation onto them. I’ve been using a Russian software package called “Book Designer 4.0” with great success but I want to be able to format pdf files exactly right for this screen -something this program won’t do.

  4. tramm_hudson says:

    I’ve added my bloglines2pdf tool to the above linked site. It uses your own Bloglines login to fetch all of your blogs and tries to format them for display on the PRS500. It’s not perfect (no images, occasional droppage of words), but solves many of the RSS/Atom/RDF issues since Bloglines produces a fairly clean file based on its internal database.

    In response to rtdarlington’s frustration with Sony, my experience is that Sony’s engineering departments have never seemed to be quite onboard with any sort of after-market customer engineering. A long time ago I reverse engineered the Sony Control-AII protocol for their audio devices, which is a fairly interesting bidirectional, multidrop bus protocol with device addressing and a simple checksum. When they added a control port to their video devices, rather than reuse the good protocol they developed Control-L that is a unidirection, no checksum, no addressing scheme little more than just encoding the IR remote on a wire.

    It is as if the different engineering units at Sony have no communication with each other that would have allowed them to make a truly unified product line. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony’s publishing group didn’t have any technical information on the screen itself and only has licensing details…

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