Migrating all my Palm e-books to PPC

[SteelWheel]

I have a fair number of ebooks from Peanut Press/Palm Digital Reader/e-reader/whatever they're calling it this week. I'm now in the process of migrating from my Treo to a PPC platform. I figured my easiest plan of attack was to just take two SD-card readers (nearly all of them are on an SD card), and just drag and drop from one to the other. Get the Palm eReader app for the PPC platform and install on my new device and I should be good to go, right? Or have I missed something? Will DRM issues prevent me from copying these over so easily, or is there something else I'm not taking into account? I'm hoping that this turns out to be the easiest task in my migration to the land of Pocket PC.

Thanks for help.

[disconnected]

I don't think there should be any problem. You'll probably just have to enter your name and credit card info when you open the first book. Ereader has the least annoying DRM that I know of.

[surur]

I've always trusted palm e-reader to be the best ebook drm solution ever. I should work as you describe. If you do have any problems please report back.

Surur

[Jorgen]

You won't get any problems. I read my books on both platforms.

Jorgen

[SteelWheel]

Hmm. I actually finally got around to doing this (copying all my ebooks from Palm to PPC). eReader doesn't seem to want to recognize the books. When I tap "Book", followed by "Open", I get a blank bookshelf....I know the books are there because I see them via File Explorer (when I try to just open them from there, I get one of those messages that says "There is no applications associated with "Book X". Run the application first, then open this file from within the application). In fact at various times I placed them both in root and in a "My Documents" folder. Is there some other foldername into which they should go? Thanks for help.

[Jorgen]

Hmmm, did I say you wouldn't get any problems? Sorry. I thought the reader software created the directories.

eReader expects its books to be in a directory called "My Documents\Peanut Reader".

iSilo ebooks should be in a directory called "My Documents\iSilo".

I don't know about MobiPocket ebooks.

The My Documents directory should be on the storage cards and main memory (if you want to keep books there).

Jorgen

[keelinlee]

...
I don't know about MobiPocket ebooks.
...


There is a FAQ about this in the Mobipocket Knowledge Base. The folders browsed on the memory card are the same whatever the PDA system.
Just check that the eBooks must be encrypted for the PDA you will use.
You don't have any problem if you use unencrypted books, or books sold encrypted directly on the card.

[SteelWheel]

I followed up with Jorgen's section and made sure that there was both a "My Documents" folder on my storage card, and a "Peanut Reader" folder within that, and that my books resided within that folder. I was still presented with an empty bookshelf. aaarggh.

I suppose(?) I can always do this the old-fashioned brute force way, and copy these folders one at a time into the card using ActiveSync, but I know that's slower going by far and also (let's face it) not nearly as fun and cool. Besides which, there's no reason why it shouldn't work the way I want to do it..I just can't seem to figure out why not--and the more important thing is to get the books migrated, so I may start on the project that way in the next few days.

On a related note: I shelled out the $10 for the "Pro" version of eReader for PPC, since I actually found the Pro eReader for Palm to be worth the cost (to me at least) in terms of extra functions--things like right-justification, fonts, and ability to change screen orientation made the program far more useful to me. It seems that none of these features are present on the PPC version. Options on the menu appear to be far fewer those of its Palm counterpart. Have I missed something here, or is my experience common? Almost makes me want to try MS reader, but I know that in that case, I'd have to shell out the same money for the books I've already purchased all over again, so that's not an option. Besides, I too hate the more onerous DRM. I'd rather stay with the eReader world--even if it means that I ultimately end up retaining my Treo 90 as my primary ebook "workhorse", in addition to my XV6600. Hmm. So much for my move into the "one, converged, device" world. Yuck :cry:

<edit> Actually you got me onto the right track there after all: The folder it's looking for is called "Peanut Press", not "Peanut Reader". You'd think that this sort of info would be made more readily available by the eReader folks. People like me who migrate between platforms and use external storage for their ebooks are all too common (at least within this little niche world of ebook readers such as ourselves)--seems like a little primer for migrators and power users is called for on eReader's part. Their on line documentation for the program seems to have been written back in the era of the Palm V, and makes almost no references to the PPC platform at all, other than a quick statement to the effect that "it all works exactly the same on the PPC". I'm here to tell ya, folks: It doesn't.

I still have my other issue of trying to get some of that functionality of the Palm version on the PPC version. Anyone else have some experience with both who can confirm that some of my favorite features will not be available to me on the PPC platform? Thanks

[ChristopherTD]

Rename the "Peanut Reader" folder to "Peanut Press" and you should be good to go!

It also works happily with "My Documents\Peanut Press" on a SD card, there is no need to keep the books in main memory.

For me the main benefit of the Pro version of Reader is that it lets you select a small margin, which makes the page look better to me. Before the text was hard up against the edge (or overlapping it in italics).

[disconnected]

I think ereader can access any fonts you have on your PPC, but I'm not sure. They have a couple of font packs on their site that you can buy and install.

[Jorgen]

Rename the "Peanut Reader" folder to "Peanut Press"

Yes, "Peanut Press" is the name. I did actually check the name on the PPC but typed something else! Sorry.

Jorgen