How to Convert Google Books to Sony Reader Format

When I bought my Sony Reader, I planned to buy e-books from Sony’s on-line ebook store. But I soon realized that a lot of ebooks are available on the internet for free.

Project Gutenberg offers thousands of titles (mostly fiction) in txt format, while manybooks.net provides an impressive array of books in Sony format (as well as several other formats).

The motherload of free ebooks, however, is books.google.com. The Google folks are busy digitizing every book they can get their hands on. As of this writing, they have reportedly digitized over 10,000 public domain books, which anyone can download for free in pdf format.

But there is something screwy about the Google pdf files. My Sony Reader (PRS-500 model, purchased in December 2006) cannot read Google pdfs, and I understand that later models have the same problem.

Recommended Technique for Google Book Conversion

I have tried many techniques for adapting the Google pdfs to my Sony Reader and here is the best I have come up with:

1. select a public domain book at books.google.com and download it to your computer,

2. open the file using Adobe Acrobat Professional,

3. select “save as” from Adobe’s file menu,

4. in the drop-down “Save as type” menu, select “Adobe PDF Files, Optimized,” and

5. save the new file to your computer.

You can then load the book onto your Sony Reader just as you would any other file.

As with other pdf files, you will have trouble zooming in on the converted book. Change your setting to the “landscape” view, and you should be able to read most books.

I realize that many people do not have access to Adobe Acrobat Professional. It is likely, however, that other lower-price pdf programs would perform a similar conversion. Considering all the books you will be able to read for free from Google, it might be worthwhile to buy a copy of Professional.

Lesser Techniques

There are other clunkier ways to get a Google book onto your Sony Reader:

1. Convert to JPG Format

Using Paperport software, I converted a Google book to a series of jpg images, which I then put on my Sony Reader. Turning the page from one jpg to the next took longer than an ordinary page turn on the device, and the naming of pages was a problem (they had to be named sequentially to flow properly as jpeg files).

Because of the way the Sony Reader views picture files, it would be difficult to put more than one book on your device at a time using this technique, and this method eats up a lot of memory.

2. Convert to Text

I also tried using OCR software to convert the pdf files to text. I then loaded the resulting text file onto my Sony Reader. This method works, but you have all the problems normally associated with OCR conversion — some of the text does not convert properly, there are many typos, and pictures are misplaced or non-existent.

Conclusion

If you have a Sony Reader, do find a way to load Google’s books onto your device. It is worth the trouble — there are thousands of excellent free books to read, and the number grows daily.

I personally prefer the many non-fiction titles, which offer interesting historical perspectives on all kinds of topics. Today I finished “The Right Way to Do Wrong” by Harry Houdini (1906), and loved it.