Let me start off by giving a quick rundown.

There are some really good tools available for the Sony Reader to make content for it in LRF format. Right now, the two big ones are Book Designer (BD) and html2lrf. Pielrf (IMHO) still needs some work at least for Windows. But it can get there and I think it will.

BD is hosted on a Russian website. The links to get it are available someplace on the forum. You need the base install and the upgrade for it. html2lrf is part of Libprs500 and used to convert html to LRF. Once you learn how to format your html, it's not too hard to use. It's not a GUI like BD.

That said, there are other tools for dealing with manga/comic book scans and PDF files. We'll leave those for the moment.

You can purchase books for the reader from the Connect store, but you'll find it limited at the moment. If you have a Windows based computer you can go to Google and search for Convert LIT 1.8 and you'll find it. Then you can purchase LIT format books and use CLIT to break the DRM or convert to HTML. Then you can load the DRMless LIT file into BD and edit from there or use html2lrf to deal with the HTML code. Your choice.

There is NO true plug and play solution (IMHO). Every program for creating LRF requires some sort of twiddling about. Even if it's just in BD fixing what it things are titles that really are not. These tools help make the reader much better then it ever would be if all we had was the Connect store.

I'm attaching the two files needed for BD. But remember, the 2nd file while current can change at any time and not be current. So watch the forum to find out when it changes and what the new link is for the update.

1. unzip the file BookDesigner40.zip
2. Right click on th .msi file from the ZIP and install
3. unzip the file Bookdesigner2007-07-30.zip on top of the files in the c:\Program files\book designer\ directory and you have it updated.

Now go read the forum and you'll find directions in various places on how to do what you want using BD and html2lrf.

If you still have questions AFTER reading the Sony Reader foums in their entirety, feel free to ask.

Jon

In case anyone has any issues with BD 05/30/2007, here is BD 04/12/2007 just in case. But if you install this update, you can replace the file clit12a.exe with clit 1.8. Just copy clit 1.8 over clit12a.exe leaving the name the same.

It has come to my attention that the upgrade for 2007-07-30 is not complete. It relies on people having gone through the upgrade path.. 2007-04-12, 2007-05-30, and then 2007-07-30. So what I have done is combine all three upgrades into one. I started with the earliest and added the others to it in date order. So now the 2007-07-30 update should be complete. So you can now start with the installer and then use this to upgrade and you won't get the error message that you cannot make Sony books.

If there is a problem, please let me know.

Also please go grab the Book Cleaner files over at http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11649
Links to all the historical test releases and the main install, and current full releases are also available in the Book Designer@Wiki » Wiki page.
I finally took a test drive with Book Designer on my office machine (running XP) and it seems to work just as advertised. I'm running Vista at home. Has anyone used the software on a Vista machine? My apologies if that has been discussed at length already. I couldn't find it poking around in the forums.
The following is from another thread.


I am having a lot of trouble getting this to work. Every book I load into BD, it tells me it "can not transform to BookDesigner format". All my books are in rtf format. I saved one in htm format and got the same message. I was able to load one book after using the Fileconverter to convert to text. But, when I went to save the lrf, it told me "failed to make Sony Reader file".

What am I doing wrong? I am running BD 4 with the 5/30 update. I am using Vista and I installed the DhtmlEd.msi.
You need to have Microsoft Word installed as Book Designer uses it to convert RTF to HTML in order to load the file. It sounds like you might not have Word installed. Do you have Word installed?
Yes, Office 2007 Pro.
From the System Check button:
---------------------------
System Checking
---------------------------
MS Word version: 12.0

it is suitable



Languages installed



Cyrillic: True

Western Europe: True

Central Europe: True



System CP: 1252
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------
I just figured it out maybe.... You're on Vista. Do you hav write access to Program Files? You might not given Vista's new security. Uninstall Book Designer and try installing it to a different directory other then Program Files. Book Designer does write to directories inside it's install directory.
That was it! You are a genius. Thank you.
Happy to help. Sometimes all it takes is someone else (in this case yourself) to say something the right way to get me to remember.