Looking for SD cards - help?

[Avistew]

Hi there.

I've been looking for SD memory cards, specifically small ones (I mean capacity, not size). I bought an ebook reader that has a memory card slot especially so I could have my ebooks on cards, and not have to go through pages of titles to select one inside the reader.

So I have been looking for ~10MB SD cards, which I have been told exist, but not finding any anywhere. I'd be okay with something a bit bigger, but certainly not as big as 100Mb or so, which is the smallest I've found so far (apart from 16MB, but they were only sold by lots of 50).

So that's my first thing. The second one is less important but would be nice too: I'm wondering if anyone knows how to print SD labels, so I can label them with the books that are in them, and treat them as giant omnibus. Since I want to fill them up with free-domain stuff, it's not like the dead author is suddenly going to publish a new one or anything.
I was just wondering if there was anything made specifically for printing DS labels, or if I'll have to do it the old-fashion way, that is design an image the right size, print it on sticker paper and cut it.

Thanks!

[Chyron8472]

Avistew, which ebook reader do you have?

It sounds absurd that you shouldn't be able to use SD cards with a reasonably modern capacity. Tell us which ebook reader you have and then I can look up the specs to see if the device has an upper limit on what size card it takes. If it can only take cards up to ~10MB, then it has to be a really old reader or something. Still... my Dad has a Kindle 1 and though it takes SD cards, the capacity limit for it is not that low if even exists.

EDIT: come to think of it, my wife got a Kindle 2 for her birthday from my parents, and I do remember file sizes of books that I was breaking the DRM on and/or converting to MOBI format, and I doubt you would be able to get more than a dozen books on a 10MB card. Maybe you meant 10GB?



EDIT AGAIN: So I don't get flamed for breaking DRM, let me explain that the reason why is so that I can rename ebook titles to something that has the series' name and/or number in it so that the books sort properly in alphabetical order on the Kindle's menu.

[GinnyN]

Originally Posted by Chyron8472

Avistew, which ebook reader do you have?

It sounds absurd that you shouldn't be able to use SD cards with a reasonably modern capacity. Tell us which ebook reader you have and then I can look up the specs to see if the device has an upper limit on what size card it takes. If it can only take cards up to ~10MB, then it has to be a really old reader or something. Still... my Dad has a Kindle 1 and though it takes SD cards, the capacity limit for it is not that low if even exists.

She wants the capacity to be low. It's not like the Reader can't read something higher.

Anyway, I think trying to find a lower capacity SD Card is lost cause already. The Smallest one I could find on Chile were about 1 Gb in size (There's must be ones with less, but, I haven't do anything to trying to find one),

[Chyron8472]

yes, but my question is: Why so low a capacity? even 1GB cards don't cost that much, and as you say, that's still on the low end.

[DjNDB]

Originally Posted by avistew

I bought an ebook reader that has a memory card slot especially so I could have my ebooks on cards, and not have to go through pages of titles to select one inside the reader.

You would rather have one SD-Card per book and look for the specific card in the physical world, instead of just selecting the title on the screen?

If that's more convenient to you, than you might just take some time to get used to it, or the usability of the particular e-book reader is not suitable for your needs.

I would absolutely prefer a list of titles, if it can be sorted (alphabetically, by year, genre, ...) or even be searched in, over having dozens of cards flying around.

[GinnyN]

Apparently she doesn't want to store a whole library in one SD, just have a library of SD with some books each.

[Leak]

Originally Posted by Chyron8472

Tell us which ebook reader you have and then I can look up the specs to see if the device has an upper limit on what size card it takes. If it can only take cards up to ~10MB, then it has to be a really old reader or something.

The way I interpreted her post she wants to find small SD cards as she plans only putting a few eBooks on each of them (like just putting all books of a series on a single SD card, but not as many books as possible) so she wants to not waste money on extra unused capacity.

But still - since those tiny SD cards aren't in huge demand they'll probably be more expensive than buying 1GB or 2GB ones and simply leaving most of them unused...

[Chyron8472]

Yes, well... I suppose I fail for not having read that part of the original post thoroughly.

I agree. Avistew, finding SD cards with so small a size is probably a lost cause.

However, if the reason why you feel the need to organize your ebooks in such a fashion is because of the fact that ebooks in various series often don't sort properly in a long list together, then I can help you with that, since I've had to tackle the issue myself.


EDIT: Okay, umm... Avistew, if you're looking for small capacity Memory cards, I might have found something on Amazon.com, though not more than about 3 are available per page I visited.

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-64-Sec...p_ob_e_title_2
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...AC6AM84GJSXYYN
http://www.amazon.com/Lexar-32MB-SD-.../dp/B0006N2PBS



Again, if the reason why you're doing it this way is because ebook titles don't sort right when in order of book title, I will still tell you exactly what I did.

[Rather Dashing]

...I'm kind of confused by the idea of getting an eBook reader, and then wanting a collection that can be counted and noted in terms of physical space.

[Avistew]

Thanks!

Sorry I might not have been very specific. Well, what happened is that first I put all of my books on the reader. But with like a thousand of them, it was a hassle to get to the one I wanted.

So I figured I could have it separated in a few cards. Like one with all the plays, one with all the sci-fi, things like that. Not just one book per card, more like 20-50, something more manageable to search through.

The reader (Sony PRS 505, incidentally) can read cards at least up till 4GB which is what I've used with it, but the idea of getting 4GB cards and filling them only a little bit seemed silly to me. I'd rather have smaller cards that I'd fill completely and lock, and treat them as some kind of omnibus. Like X's complete works or something.

I got the ebook reader in the first place in order to read classics that aren't always available here in Western Canada because they're French, and so I could have lots at a time (I don't think I would have bought a thousand paper books, even though I've been reading every day since I downloaded them. I probably would have been too worried that I'd never read all of them or something).

I think I answered all the questions... if you have more, do ask. (And thanks for the amazon links! I never thought to check for memory cards on amazon for some reason).

EDIT: although Chyron you might still be able to help me. I had a huge PDF with all of Molière's plays that I divided up into separate plays. Now I made it into a pdf because calibre just never makes lrfs the way I want. It gives them a huge number of pages, inserts lines between paragraphs (even if I check the "remove lines between paragraphs") and a 200 p book can easily become double that, and bigger than the pdf which I think defeats the point. Any adive on how to make them look exactly the way I want would be welcome.

Also, for some reason it insists on saying I wrote these plays, and although I change the author tag, once I put it on my reader I'm still listed as the author (and, as though that wasn't bad enough, with my first name first).

Although I think the problem only occurs when working from my computer that has Ubuntu. The one with windows doesn't seem to have the name problem (but the conversion problems are still the same though).

[Chyron8472]

hmm...

Well, what you thought of doing certainly would work. Basically, what you're saying is that you have a crap ton of ebooks and don't want to swim through them all to find what you want.

Though I don't personally have thousands (or even hundreds) of ebooks and so don't have that problem yet, I figure that what I would do, though, is to store my library of ebooks on my computer/laptop and upload only certain ones I wanted to my eBook Reader as needed, rather than searching through a stack of cards looking for the right one.

I use Calibre to manage my ebooks, and figure you might find it useful, though I started using it for a different reason.

My wife reads fan-fiction from fanfiction.net, and I found a site that can download whole stories from there with little effort. However, the person who runs the site has options to download in HTML, ePub or LRF format which means I needed an ebook format converter so the Kindle can use it. Calibre happens to do that rather well it seems. However, it also tries to act as a library of sorts, keeping all my ebook files together in one place on my computer, which is a plus. (It doesn't break DRM on ebooks. I use a Python script for that, which is a seperate thing.)

You might find Calibre useful as a way to backup your stuff, even if you still use memory cards anyway. The website for it has an intro tutorial for it that makes it easy enough for a three-headed monkey to understand.

EDIT: Oh, and it's free.

[Avistew]

I use Calibre too, but I must not have enough heads because I can't make it work right :P As I said, it tends to make things take too many pages. Although my main complain with it is it always puts things in a huge sized font and I don't know how to change that.
When I make my own I choose 8-9 as the size, but the ones made like Calibre look like they're size 11-12 or something. And that's the SMALL size, since you can zoom in more. It's ridiculously huge for me and I haven't been able to figure out how to program it so the default font would be much smaller.

This being said, you've only mentioned Kindle in your posts and they don't read lrf (and I hate epub. I HATE IT. I am NOT reading a book that isn't justified. I just am not.) so maybe you're not familiar with how Calibre deals with lrfs?

(Also, for info, most of the books I have are around 300Kb in size, so much smaller than yours.)

[Leak]

Originally Posted by avistew

Sorry I might not have been very specific. Well, what happened is that first I put all of my books on the reader. But with like a thousand of them, it was a hassle to get to the one I wanted.

Please don't tell me that crappy eBook reader doesn't support stuffing your eBooks into a folder structure - because that's the only way I could imagine swapping cards being faster/easier/whatever at all...

np: Autechre - redfall (Oversteps)

[Avistew]

Originally Posted by Leak

Please don't tell me that crappy eBook reader doesn't support stuffing your eBooks into a folder structure - because that's the only way I could imagine swapping cards being faster/easier/whatever at all...

np: Autechre - redfall (Oversteps)

Nope. They're organised by folders on my computer, but you can't do that on the reader.
What there is is tags, or "collections" as they call them, that you can add and can kinda substitute, but of course you can't get folders within folders with that method.

The other thing is that when you sort it by authors, well it still show all the books, just sorted by author. I'd rather have just a list of authors, because if you have 20 books by the same dude you need to flip several pages before you even reach the next author.

But it followed the things I wanted (no wifi, no touch screen, memory card slot) and I didn't think to check about the folders thing before I bought it.

[Chyron8472]

Sure, I know about LRF. Kindle doesn't use ePub either.
Kindle supports MOBI, AZW, TXT, PDF and PRC.
Sony PRS supports LRF, PDF, TXT, RTF, and ePub.

Here, this might help. Highlight an ebook or group of ebooks, and click the convert button:



Note: You might try "disable font size rescaling" and see if that helps.

[EDIT:] Once you know how you like it set up, you can make that the default by clicking on the "Preferences" button at the top of Calibre, click the "Conversion" tab on the left, and then change the setting in there, because that stuff is the default. [/edit]
----

Incidentally, here is what I use for Fanfiction.net stuff:

http://flag.erayd.net/

[Avistew]

Thanks I'll tell you how it works out for me.

[Chyron8472]

You're welcome. I'm glad to help.

Originally Posted by Leak

Please don't tell me that crappy eBook reader doesn't support stuffing your eBooks into a folder structure

Originally Posted by avistew

Nope. They're organised by folders on my computer, but you can't do that on the reader.
What there is is tags, or "collections" as they call them, that you can add and can kinda substitute, but of course you can't get folders within folders with that method.

Not with Kindle either. Kindle doesn't have "collections" either, though if you type a search word at the Kindle's menu, it will show you every ebook that has that word and where the word is in it. So, if I create the tag "xfanfic" at the Table of Contents in each fanfiction ebook, when I type "xfanfic" at the Kindle's menu, it will display only those ebooks.

It sucks, but I bet the eBook reader developers either haven't worked it out yet but might in a future firmware update, or else they're holding out for future eBook reader hardware to get people to buy them because they'd have that.

[Avistew]

I have another question!

But first, update: it didn't work. I tried what you said but for some reason after about ten pages there was only a few line per page and a 100 pages .pdf turned into a 800 pages .lrf
I think I'm going to stick with the pdfs. They might take longer to turn pages though. But at least I can really design them the way they want. I spent a lot of time with the page er... designing, like condensing or extending lines so it would fit better, things like that. I can't do that with lrf with any program that I know of, checking exactly what's on each page and stuff.

Anyway, here is my next question. Still to reduce the number of entries to look through when choosing a book, I'd like to merge some together. For instance, I get my books from a website that reproduces paper books faithfully. As a result Les Misérables is cut into 5 ebooks, the way it was published because it's so long. But it's a single novel and I can't ever imagine I'd want to start at the third one or something, so I'd love to merge them all in one bit file.
Any idea how to do that?
Bonus points if there is a way to add a table of contents so that I can go directly to one book, in which case I could easily have for instance series as one file with the option of jumping directly to one of the books.

(I work with Ubuntu and don't have Microsoft Office. I specify that because people keep suggesting a program called Book Designer that only works if you've got Microsoft Word installed because it's using it, so I can't use that program).

[Chyron8472]

Try using Sigil to edit ebooks. There's a downside though. You said you hate epub, and Sigil likes to edit epub or html.

Meh. You can convert your book to epub(s), edit it/them, and convert back, I suppose.

Although not extensively, I have used Sigil a few times and it works well enough.

http://code.google.com/p/sigil/



....as far as getting the ebooks to convert properly in Calibre, the most I can say (at this point in my limited experience) is to just mess with the settings until you can get it to work. That sounds dumb, but Calibre really is the best ebook converter out there so far. Incidentally, I never mess with the base font size, myself. I always leave it at zero. However, I do sometimes mess with the "Remove spacing beween paragraphs," "Insert Blank Line," "No Text Justification" and "Linearize Tables" checkboxes to see what effect they have on the book(s).

[Avistew]

Thanks, I'll give it a try