How to assemble ebook for your PSP?

Once you're done converting the PDF to JPEGs, you should have a folder containing images named Page0001.jpg, Page0002.jpg, etc. Name this folder whatever you want the title of your e-book to be and place the folder inside the PHOTO folder inside the PSP folder on your Memory Stick. After you unmount your PSP from your computer, simply navigate to Photo, make sure the Memory Stick is selected, and hit the X button. Scroll through the images and list of folders until you locate your e-book.

Highlight your e-book and press the X button to load the first page. If you hit the Triangle button to bring up the control panel, you can select the first option on the top row, View Mode, to set the page to be zoomed in, so that you can easily go through all the pages of your book by clicking the R trigger without having to continually rezoom. To scan up and down the page, use the analog stick. Most pages will load centered, so you will need to scan up to the top of the page and then scan down as you read. If you need to zoom in on a section of the text, hold down on the square button and move the analog stick up and down to zoom in and out.

The great thing about this tips is that every document that is printable from your computer can be converted into JPEGs for viewing on your PSP on the go.

How to Convert PDF to JPEGs?

After I have my 8 inch by 9 inch PDF file, I need to convert it into a series of JPEGs numbered in sequence and all contained within a folder that I can place inside /PSP/PHOTO/ on my PSP's Memory Stick. For the most part, any imaging program capable of working with PDFs can be used to convert PDFs to JPEG, so make sure you look at the following programs before you go searching around the web for a PC version of programs like PDF 2 PSP.

Adobe Acrobat.
Most likely, you already have a copy of Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer. They are actually both the same program, only Adobe has recently renamed Acrobat Reader as Adobe Reader. If you don't have either on your computer, you can grab a copy for free directly from Adobe (http://www.adobe.com). This program will allow you to view the PDF you have created, but unfortunately it does not support exporting the page images into different formats.

If you own the full version of Adobe Acrobat, you can export the PDF file as a series of JPEGs, and Acrobat will even do the work of naming each separate page as another image in sequence (Image001.jpg, Image002.jpg, etc.).

Preview.app
If you are on Mac OS X, you can use Preview (included with the operating system and located in the Applications folder). If you open the PDF for your e-book in Preview, you can use File Save As to manually save each page as a separate JPEG file. For a large document, this can be laborious to say the least, so it is not the ideal solution.

Image-editing programs
Using an image-editing program such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can open a selected page of the PDF and resave it as a JPEG with high quality compression. On Mac OS X, Graphic Converter (available from http://www.lemkesoft.com/en/graphcon.htm for $30 USD) can do the same. You might already have some sort of image-editing program that came with a digital camera or scanner and is capable of opening PDFs and converting them to JPEGs. The GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/), is available for Windows, Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X, and can handle a wide variety of formats, including PDF and JPEG.

PDF 2 PSP
If you are using a Mac, then you can grab a helpful, free little program called PDF 2 PSP (http://pdf2psp.sourceforge.net/).

In PDF 2 PSP, you choose the location of the PDF and then a folder where you want the collection of sequenced JPEGs to be stored. If your PSP is connected and mounted on your computer, you can even have the program output directly to /PSP/PHOTO/ on your Memory Stick. You have the option to either adjust the picture to be displayed in portrait or landscape view on the PSP, you can set the quality of the image, and you can set the size of the pages to a variety of options: Original Size, Fit to Screen, Fit to Width, 2x Screen Width, and High Resolution. I recommend choosing Original Size, 2x Screen Width, or High Resolution to ensure legibility of your document on the PSP, and setting the layout to portrait to allow you the ability to both zoom in on the image and pan and scan around the page.

iPSP
iPSP (http://ipsp.kaisakura.com/; $19.99 USD) features the ability to convert PDFs to JPEGs formatted to fit on your PSP, but there aren't as many configuration options available as there are with PDF 2 PSP. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, however, as iPSP does a good job of converting PDFs to JPEGs. There are both Mac and PC versions of the program, but at this time, it looks like only the Mac version supports PDF to JPEG conversion. As an example for this hack, I took a PDF copy of the PSP's manual from the PlayStation site (http://www.playstation.com/manual/pdf/PSP-1001K_1.pdf) and converted it into a folder of sequenced JPEGs for reading on the PSP.

With iPSP, there is no need to locate the folder of converted images and then move them to /PSP/PHOTO/ on your Memory Stick, since the program automatically places the files in the proper location as it converts.

How to Print Documents to PDF?

Since you know that it is possible to view JPEG images on the PSP, and that there are already a spattering of e-books in JPEG format available for the PSP , why not make your own e-books out of documents you have on your computer or can download from the Web?

The easiest way to create e-books is to generate a PDF. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X have different ways of printing your text files directly to PDF, and as PDF is essentially an image format, it is relatively easy to export the different pages of the PDF files into separate JPEG images for viewing on the PSP.

If you're on Windows or Linux, rather than spending all your money on Adobe Acrobat, you can grab a free copy of Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org), which, besides being a fully functional and free alternative to Microsoft Office, has the ability to convert files to PDF. But if the document you want to convert isn't an office or text document, you may still be in luck: if you can print it to a PostScript file, you can use the ps2pdf utility from GhostScript (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/) to create your PDF. To print to a PostScript file, configure a generic PostScript printer that outputs to a file rather than a USB or parallel port.

In order to make the pages of your documents easily readable on your PSP with plenty of zoom, I recommend setting the page settings for your PDF printout to 8 inches by 9 inches with 0.3-inch margins and a nice 12 or 14 point font. I have created a special page setting for my printer in Mac OS X that measures 8 inches by 9 inches with 0.1-inch margins around. In the actual document settings, I choose to give the document 0.3-inch margins. Using Mac OS X's built-in PDF support, I print the document directly to PDF.