Raidenex How-To: Read eBooks on your PSP

The PSP, as we all know, is a sexy little machine that can do pretty much anything media related – movies, songs, pictures, games. However, apparently reading books isn’t hip enough for todays crowd, so it’s an avenue that Sony didn’t pursue.

The homebrew crowds have their own solution – they created a text-reader that has all sorts of nifty bookmarking features, and you can play music in the background. If you have a 1.50 PSP, or a 2.00 PSP you’re willing to downgrade to 1.5 (and not play GTA: LCS), then go to http://www.pspupdates.com and check out what’s available.

For the rest of us, there is still hope. Before I start though, you’ll need to download the following programs:

GSView and Ghostscript from this page. (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/)

ConvertLIT from this page. (http://www.convertlit.com/)

Also, you’ll need a PSP with firmware 2.00 or higher, and a USB cable to transfer files to your PSP.

Phase 1 – Preparation

Install all the necessary programs – install Ghostscript first, follwed by GSView and ConvertLIT.

Connect your PSP to the computer via the USB cable, and create a new folder in the PSP directory called BOOK.

That’s it. Easy, huh? Now, if your eBook is in .txt or .htm format already, you can just put it straight into this folder, and skip down to the section on reading your eBook. If it is in .pdf or .lit format, read on.

Phase 2 – Conversion

PDF->PSP

I will come back and edit this section once i’ve downloaded GhostScript. I’m capped at the moment, so downloading the 10 meg file would take 2 hours.

LIT (Microsoft Reader format) -> HTM

Run LitCoverter.exe in the folder where you unziped ConvertLIT. It will come up with a dialogue box asking to select the .lit file – browse to where you keep your ebooks, and select the one you want to convert. This will NOT change or delete the original in any way.

A new dialogue box will come up asking for the ‘parent directory of the expanded file’. I suggest making a new folder in your eBook folder called ‘PSP eBooks’ or something. Select this folder, and click OK. Click OK again.

Viola – you have just converted a Microsoft Reader .lit book into a whole bunch of .htm (or in some cases one) .htm file.

If it is only one .htm file, rename it something shorter – you will have to enter this in your PSP in the next step. Copy this file to your book folder.

If it is a whole lot of html files along with a contents.htm, do NOT rename anything – simply copy all of the files to a sub-folder in your BOOK folder. It doesn’t matter what the subfolder is called, but I suggest the shortned name of the book with no spaces (for instance, FELLOWSHIP for Fellowship of the Ring).

Phase 3 – Reading your book.

After all the files have been copied across, open the Web Browser in your PSP. You don’t have to have an active internet connection for this to work – just cancel if it asks you for one. Enter the following into the address bar:

file:///PSP/BOOK/nameofbook.htm

Where nameofbook.htm is the name of your ebook. For a multi-htm ebook, you would enter the address

file:///PSP/BOOK/NAMEOFBOOK/contents.htm where NAMEOFBOOK is the subfolder you created.

Click on Enter, and viola – your ebook appears in the internet browser! Scrolling is done with the d-pad, and is rather annoying because it skips down half a page each press of the down button, but at least you’ll be able to read.

In order to easily open your book later, add the page to My Bookmarks.

Now, if Sony would only add native PDF support to its browser, so I wouldn’t have to go through all the conversion stuff.

If you have any questions on how to get this working properly (if you’re having any trouble) please post them here.

Actually, I heard that there is a program out there for 1.50 that allows you to imitate any firmware to load UMD games that need an updated firmware.

THOUGH…. I don’t recall the name of it. 🙁