Reading ebooks, PDF, HTML and TXT files on your Sony PSP - Tutorial

You don't need to alter your PSP in any respect to turn it into a small ebook. This method enables you to view real .txt and .html files in your PSP without having to convert them to .jpegs! This is a harmless, simple exploit that works with all PSP with firmware version 2.0 and up. You really don't have to be a rocket scientist for this task.

However, I didn't find tutorials on this issue on the web so I decided to write one. Greetings go to all guys'n'girls in East Asia, I know you love to read in the subway :) This is how you do it with a Sony PSP.

Reading simple .txt files

First you need a .txt file to get started. Choose a short one for practice.
It is very important that the file name is short. You will have to type it in, so it will better be short. Rename text files to lower cap names without spaces and special characters - like house.txt. Don't use .doc or .rtf files, the PSP cannot display them! Convert them to plain text.

Ok, now connect the PSP with the USB cable to your PC/notebook and open the Windows file explorer (Win+E). On your PSP open the menu. Open "Settings" -> "USB Connection". Now a new drive letter should appear on your Windows file explorer.

Draw the .txt file to the drive letter of your PSP (e.g. the memory card). That's it for the technical part. I hear some people yelling at their diplays now "What!? That's it?? Are you kidding?!". Wait for it... we're doing this step-by-step.

On your PSP go to "Network" -> "Internet Browser". On the lower left of the browser the icon "File" should be highlighted. Press (X). Now "Address Entry" should be highlighted. Press (X) again.

Now you can enter the file name that is located on the root directory of your memory card. Type file:/house.txt (e.g. the name of your text file, of course). You cannot browse through such files on your memory card with the PSP browser, that is why you should use simple, short and easy-to-remember names for your files. Depending on the length of the text it will take some seconds for the PSP to display it.
Ok, first success then. You see an offline text file on your PSP.

Important: First bookmark the file. Go to the (HEART) symbol to activate the bookmark menu. Currently the PSP can only hold up to six bookmarks. Now you don't have to type in the file name each time you start the PSP browser anew.

Go to the "A" icon on the menu to bring up the display menu and press (X). Choose the "Display Modus" entry and hightlight "Just-Fit". Now the text width fits into the browser screen, so that you don't have to scroll sideways when reading. Or choose "Smart-Fit" - it does basically the same.

First downturn of the PSP browser: The text file is not really reorganized to fit the screen, so the paragraphs will not be displayed with a correct breaking. You can adjust the text size by choosing (A) -> "Text Size" and the display brightness with the small oval button right next to the "PSP" logo on your PSP.

In order to scroll down (and up) through the text press (TRIANGLE). Now you can scroll using the (UP) and (DOWN) arrow keys.

Next downturn: there is no navigation bar showing you what text line you currently look at. This is a problem when reading long text files without page numbers or paragraphs. In addition to this the cache of the webbrowser is only about 2048 kB. The file size of a single text file must not be larger than this limit.

Well, it seems that we'll have to live with it :)

Reading .htm/.html files with the PSP webbrowser

It's basically the same. Upload the .htm/.html file to the root directory of your PSP and look at it in the browser typing in it's adress file:/[filename], e.g. file:/house.html.
However, the PSP has problems displaying pictures in the HTML files, I don't know why. Usually it is capable of viewing .jpg/.jpeg files, though.

Reading PDF files with the PSP webbrowser

As described above, the PSP browser seems to have problems displaying (offline) pictures in .htm/.html files, so you would rather read text dominant .pdf files with your PSP.

One method is to export PDF files in your Adobe Acrobat Reader to .txt files. This can be done quite easily by going to the "File" menu, choosing "Save as Text". Now you only have to rename the .txt file to a short, lower case name (e.g. "garden.txt") and view it on your PSP with the method described above. Please note, that encrypted PDF files often cannot be converted to text files.

However, there are long and elaborate PDF files that cannot be navigated through and read easily. So you will have to convert them to a HTML structure in order to view them more conveniently on your PSP webbrowser.

Reading PDF files with the PSP webbrowser - advanced

You will need a free tool that converts PDF to HTML files adding a navigational structure to them. It is called Pdftohtml (duh!).

You can find the program here: PDFtoHTML
Most people will want to download the win32 binary package of PDFtoHTML: Link

Unzip the contents of the file to a folder on your hard drive. We assume now that the folder is on drive D: and called "pdftohtml" (e.g. on d:\pdftohtml). You can put the program in any directory you like, but in this example it's, d:\pdftohtml

Now copy a .pdf file to that directory (e.g. house.pdf -> remember, use short names!).

Go to Start->Execute.
Type cmd and press OK.
The commandline interpreter opens.
Type d: [Enter]. Type cd pdftohtml [Enter]. Then type pdftohtml house.pdf [Enter].
Now the PDFtoHTML creator builds a html file structure out of the PDF file.

You will notice that the directory has three new files: house.html, house_ind.html and houses.html. house.html is the frame file for the frameset. house_ind.html is the index file with links to certain pages of the file containing the text - houses.html.

Copy those three files over to your PSP and open the file file:/house.html

Now you see the PDF text on the right side and a navigation bar with page numbers on the left. If you only want to see the text part, open file:/houses.html
Press (TRIANGLE) to be able to scroll the text up and down with the arrow keys.

You can also use tabbed browsing like in Mozilla and Firefox. It's activated with (RECTANGLE)+(ARROW), but it doesn't work well with me.


That's it. Have fun with your new PSP ebook! And always respect copyrights.

Regards, Nico Roehr (Cologne, Germany).



Courtesy of drugster.com 2006