Introduction

This code repository contains some documentation and scripts to make use of the Sony PRS T1 eBook reader on Linux. The device runs Android in it can be rooted but you can also just modify its local storage as it is visible via USB.

Motivation

First I wanted to understand how my eReader manages eBooks and annotations. Second I want to read and annotate (!) books in the device and later export the annotations in an open format. Unfortunately the situation for annotations is even worse than the situation for eBooks. De-facto standards for eBooks are EPUB and PDF (plus Amazon's own prison format that I prefer to ignore). For annotations there is no standard format.

Annotation formats

Some software such as Okular and Mendeley store annotations in special files. Other software stores annotations in the book files. PRS T1 stores annotations as SVG with metadata in SQLite3, so it can be extracted and transformed to other formats.

Current state of this software

Don't expect this project to become a real application. Right now there is only one command line script prst1.pl to copy and transform books, notes and annotations from the device to a local directory (you may first need to create some directories, database, notepads, download, markup...)

$ ./prst1.pl -?

A future idea woul include hacking calibre, but I prefer to to stick to one particular software but better work with general data formats.

Visbile directory structure of SONY PRS-T1

READER
 |-- Sony_Reader 
 |    |-- database
 |    |    |-- cache
 |    |    |    |-- books
 |    |    |         |-- x (numeric book identifier)
 |    |    |              |-- thumbnail
 |    |    |              |-- markup
 |    |    |-- sync
 |    |-- media
 |    |    |-- audio
 |    |    |-- images
 |    |    |-- notepads
 |    |    |-- books
 |    |-- data
 |         |-- albumthumbs
 |-- download

The database directory contains several SQLite3 files (.db) and a cache.

The cache directory contains one folder for each book, numbered (1,2,3...). For each book there is a thumbnail directory with images, at least with the cover image main_thumbnail.jpg. The markup directory contains a .png file and a .svg file for each markup in a book (not including highlightings).

The media directory contains actual ebooks, notes, audio-files, and images. Media files are referenced by filename in the sqlite3 databases, so don't just rename them!

Database structure

Have a look at the dbschemas directory or browse around the database with SQLite3:

$ ./prst1.pl database
$ sqlite3 database/books.db

License

Right now this repository is all public domain. Feel free to fork and publish under other licenses as well.