books on PSP

I've been using my PSP a lot this summer..... though not as much for gaming. It's still my most-used device.

I have been gaming on it, lately I've been playing Atari Classics Evolved... but I've mostly been catching up on taped tv shows, and for the last few weeks, reading books on it.

If I can come across a text file, I use a PSP ebook creator program that coverts the text file into JPG pages, which go into folders in the PICTURE section. I might be able to read the text file straight from the PSP web browser, but I find it to be finicky as to whether it'll work, and even if it does, it's tougher to scroll through one big .txt file than to look through .jpg pages.

After reading Twilight as a straight book, I've been reading the 3 sequel books this way. Currently reading Breaking Dawn on it.

I still prefer to have a physical book, I have to admit that reading on a PSP is a poor substitute. But it is handy.

The first rumour of what we now know as the PSPgo came from Dave Perry's twitter message where he said, "they've removed the stupid battery-sucking UMD disc drive". But of course since then... we also now know that the PSPgo will have the *SAME* battery life as the previous PSPs with "the stupid battery-sucking UMD disc drive"...... so what's really sucking the battery power? Sure, spinning a physical disc is power-intensive, anybody who's owned a portable CD player knows this (like me). But what most people miss is that just powering a device's SCREEN takes a lot of power.

And this is where I get back on track about reading books on my PSP. I get about 2-3 hours of PSP use on a single charge, and reading books is no different. I'm not using the UMD drive, yet it's about the same as if I was. It's because I have the screen on that whole time. That's a bummer since I'd never have to worry about that with an actual book. On the other hand, the PSP makes reading in low-light environments, like at night, very handy.

Another problem is the first book I loaded onto my PSP, I just dumped all the pages into one folder. Since I read my pages on my PSP in horizontal, landscape format, there are more pages than there would be in an actual book. Almost 2x as many, I'd say. So that first book was over 700 pages. Way more than I'd ever loaded in a single folder before. And it made scrolling through it a bit cumbersome. It also got a bit buggy, randomly skipping like 50 pages near the second half of the pages. So now I split the book up into 100 pages per folder.

It's only been the last few weeks that I've used my PSP to read full length novels... I hadn't really been reading novels for a long time, and I wanted to get back into it. The PSP has been pretty helpful in that regard. More compact than a book, and lit screen.



later
don