Play games, watch movies, browse pics, listen to music and read books on the Sony PSP
by Ben Zackheim 
{ Mar 26th 2005 at 11:14AM }
If you feel drawn and quartered after 17 hours of playing (and charging) and playing your PSP, then maybe you need
some culture. There's nothing like a good book to break up the gaming run. But you won't have to turn the device off to
get a couple of chapters in.
Game Fries went on a mission to get ebooks to work on the PSP. Mission successful. The screen has impressed us with
its ability to display text so we can see this hack working well. It's hard to tell from the pic in the piece, but
we'll find out for ourselves soon enough.
Lumines, then Dickens. Now, that's a Saturday afternoon.
[thanks anonymous]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Aaron @ Dec 18th 2005 8:46PM
It's a neat idea, but pretty useless since it's just image viewing. :(
A real ebook reader like eReader on it would be sweet. Font and color customizations, screen rotations, dictionary integration, bookmarks, notes.......that would be nice.
But For now I'll stick with my treo and eReader.
Justin @ Dec 18th 2005 8:46PM
What about us Mac users? I cannot find Paperless Printer for Mac does it or a variant exist for the Mac?
Bp @ Dec 18th 2005 8:46PM
read a book on psp??? get a life.
Eric Pobirs @ Dec 18th 2005 8:46PM
Any image management program on any OS and a supported scanner will do the job.
The bigger issue is that this is an insanely inefficient way to store pages of text. A standard 80x25 page of plain text in a word processor is only 2 kilobytes. Even a minimal B&W screenshot of same is going to be considerably larger. What is really needed is a leightweight version of Adobe Acrobat Reader with sub-pixel addressing for better looking fonts.
Unfortunately, the PSP isn't well suited for this. Even just displaying a static image from Memory Stick the power drawn is much greater than a PDA with a comparable display. The PDA is foucsed more on battery longevity than is practical for a gaming oriented product like the PSP and thus far better suited to reading lengthy texts.
If a method is found to get homebrew stuff running I give full encouragement to those producing ebook display apps but nothing they can do is going to make the PSP well suited tot he task.
McQ @ Dec 18th 2005 8:46PM
I'm getting better than 2 hours running Tony Hawk on the PSP. Presumably, displaying a static image requires much less of the 3D chips' horsepower, and consequently should have better battery life. For comparison purposes, my Tungsten T3 is only getting about 2 hours of display time (yes, the battery is getting old) and reading eBooks is my primary use for it.
If I can get 2 hours of use out of a PSP in any given day, regardless of what I'm doing with it, I'm happy. I don't actually have more time than that to spend playing with a handheld anyway.
Alps @ Dec 18th 2005 8:46PM
dickens? couldn't you have picked a better author?
TA @ Dec 18th 2005 8:46PM
i think it's a great idea to put books in psp. In japan there is a growing trend of reading books on cellphones. It is definitely better on psp with the large screen and all, probably even better than on pdas. with the millions of psps around, it wouldn't hurt to add that support.
games, video, music, books and internet browser. what else could one ask for? maybe a hdd.
Adam @ Dec 18th 2005 8:46PM
When my old Sony CLIE died, I was stuck between picking up the PSP or the TH-55, the last in the line of Sony CLIEs. The benefits of the actual PDA were numerous. eBooks, built in web access and video. However, the screen on the PSP and the promise of eBook related hacks drew me to it.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of my eBook collection is in PDB or LIT format, so I'm going to have to find a converter. Still, reading a book on the PSP ain't a bad way to spend the afternoon. The only downside I can think of is the fact that reading a book on a PDA on the subway isn't likely to get you stared at. Reading one on a PSP on the subway is likely to get you mugged.
As for the programs suggested in this essay, while I'm glad I downloaded Paperless Printer and find it to be a very nice little program, it's not what I'd suggest for this particular application. At all. Unless you've got a gig card and don't mind taking up a lot of that space with your books, PaperlessPrinter's JPEG files are simply too big.
I use the eBook to JPEG converter found at http://www.psp-hacks.com/downloads.php It's simpler than PaperlessPrinter and the JPEGs it makes are upwards of ten times smaller. The downsides are pretty steep, though. Unlike PP, it won't automatically format the text, so unless your TXT file comes already formatted, it'll look like a straight block of text without wordwrapping. I can deal with that, though. The other downside is that the images are smaller (in fact, they're perfectly sized to the PSP's screen) so a book requires many more images with this program than with PP. However, the smaller size of each image easily compensates. And having bigger images isn't all its cracked up to be when you realize that moving around them requires use of the PSP's analog button and as the image scrolls around the screen, it blurs up considerably, taking away from the reading experience.
Anyway, thanks for the article! I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who is clamouring for ways to read books on my PSP.
I've heard that there's already an official Sony eReader out in Japan. I'd be willing to pay for something like that here. Still, I kind of doubt we'll see it. Sony upset enough people in the film and TV industry by allowing MP4s. I doubt they need the anger of the literary industry as well.
Tony Johnston @ Dec 18th 2005 8:46PM
You can now, with Tiger, export any printed page directly to iPhoto, then straight out to JPG on the PSP. I created a custom page size of 3.78 x 6.66 inches in Safari, open up an HTML ebook from www.gutenberg.org, print to iPhoto using the Save as PDF options menu in the print dialog box, rotate the images 90 degrees counter clockwise in iPhoto, then export to jpg at 479x272 pixels and save the folder to my PSP. Voila! Simple, perfect ebooks.