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Can I View PDFs on my Sony PSP?

Hey Dave, I got a Sony PSP and I was wondering how do I transfer a PDF document to a PSP?

Dave's Answer:

That's a great question because it hints at the many additional capabilities that the Sony PSP offers over and above a simple portable gaming system. With the 2.0 firmware upgrade just released, the unit now has a fully featured (well, mostly fully featured) Web browser, the ability to play audio files, show movies and DVDs, and, yes, let you play some terrific games too.

In terms of viewing PDFs, I haven't found any applications that will let you view the PDFs directly, but there are some very cool tools that translate PDF documents into a series of JPEG (graphic) images which you then download as if they were photos and view, page by page.

If you're on a Mac, I'd check out PDF2PSP, a free application written by Michael W. Heinz, Sr. On the Windows side, I don't know of any free applications, but there are a number of good shareware and commercial apps you can download, two of the best being Konverter, which can handle hundreds of different conversion tasks ($24) and IntraPDF ($40).

Once you can read PDFs on your PSP, a good document to start with might well be the Sony PSP Documentation, straight from Sony!

Remember, ebook-wise, that once you have a Web browser, you can also read text files and HTML files too, which means that you can grab hundreds of books from Project Gutenberg (they have 16,000 different ebooks you can download for free!) and lots of other places, even my own Intuitive Systems Reading Library.

Hope that helps you out.

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Comments

Thanks Dave for the pointers -- the Mac app looks great. How is the PSP screen for reading books? Could you read the JPEGs created by PDF2PSP for an hour or two without your eyes bugging out?

Posted by: Josh Carter at January 25, 2006 2:54 PM

The PSP screen is beautiful, Josh, and I have definitely sat and looked at it for rather a long period of time. Having said that, it's still a small screen for reading content, so your tolerance will vary!

Posted by: Dave Taylor at January 26, 2006 8:00 AM

If we have a document or something of our own, do we put it up for download on the internet? Or do we just view it in the browser?

Posted by: ahdil at July 16, 2007 4:41 AM

New URL for Sony PSP manuals:

http://www.us.playstation.com/Support/PSP/Manuals

Apparently no PDFs!(?) - but since it's now HTML, I guess you might be able to just grab the HTML page, and put it on your PSP. ;)

Cheers

Posted by: Andrew at January 7, 2008 9:57 AM

Wrong... You can use a homebrew piece of software (if you've got CFW) which in turn, has the ability to read simple text files as well as PDF's.

You can find it here...

http://www.mediafire.com/?nhnzs2kn03w

Posted by: Bob the slob at November 23, 2008 2:11 PM

You can also use pdftohtml, it's free from sourceforge. The only problem is to compile it under mac os.
If you can't compile pdftohtml you can download OS X PDFtoHTML of Christian Hornung. It is a GUI and it doesn't seem to work very well, but it comes with the pdftohtml already compiled under the pdftohtml-0.39/src folder.

I copied the file to the usr/bin folder to run it from terminal anytime.

Posted by: E Ibarra at December 25, 2008 4:58 PM

dav e i am trying to update my psp and it wont recongize my connection to the internet

Posted by: blindman at April 11, 2009 3:23 PM

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Home-Education/Psp-Ebook-Creator.shtml

Hey Dave! There is a version for windows.It works great and it's free. Just save your info as a text file and there you go! I love it.

Posted by: Kathy Trick at August 22, 2009 9:49 AM

Thank you for the information.

Posted by: Salvy NC at December 12, 2009 11:31 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!