Sony PRS

I bought a Sony PRS a while ago, which I've been using a decent amount.  Managing books was a bit cumbersome though.  Copying anything onto it normally needs a computer, a USB connection, and management software.  Thankfully, I was able to simplify it a bit.

The PRS has a built-in 802.11g radio, so obviously data was already being transmitted over ethernet.  It also has a web browser, so again it obviously supported HTTP.  Normally the browser only supports text/html though, which precluded a lot of stuff I actually wanted it for.

PRS+ helped fix this.  It implements a lot of the things I thought were missing from the stock firmware; specifically non-html MIME type support.  Actually it integrates this with the stock browser, which even made a user friendly interface possible.  Authentication and encrypted HTTP unfortunately aren't implemented, which could make using it outside of home a bit impractical, but downloading from sites like project gutenberg normally doesn't need either.

Finally, to make everything I wanted to be able to read available via HTTP, I setup an apache webserver with mod_autoindex.  The mod_autoindex module isn't completely necessary,  but it gives nice HTML listings for directories which makes things a bit more user friendly.

Et, voila...

A big thank you to the PRS+ developers, otherwise I would have been stuck.  For anyone curious, it adds a lot over the stock firmware (file browser, screenshots, etc...).