I just recently purchased a Sony eReader (PRS-505).  My reasons are many, but most important are the portability of books (much like music and mp3 players) and the fact that with each new book I buy, I have to give up more space in my house.  I love using it – it’s easy to see the pages and to zoom if I need a bigger font.  Another bonus is that I can put all my downloaded knitting projects on the gadget, as long as they’re in .pdf format.

My major issue so far has been with the free public domain books that I have downloaded.  They come formatted as an .epub file.  And most of them have problems with the way the eReader reads the title and author for the library database.  The library reads this information from information in the .epub itself – not the title.  And many of the titles of my books were listed with incorrect capitalization or wrong authors.  So I had to figure out how to edit this information to make my library show titles and authors in a similar fashion for each book.  That led me to this page where a forum user explains his particular way of accomplishing this task.

For clarity’s sake, and so I don’t forget how to do this in the future (!), here is what I did.

1. Download and install WinRAR.
2. Navigate (in Windows Explorer) to your ebook file (.epub).
3. Right-click on the file and select “Open With”.
4. Select the last option, “Choose Default Program”, unless WinRAR is already listed – then just choose WinRAR.
   • In the “Choose Default Program” window, uncheck the “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” check box. Then select WinRAR from the list of files. If it is not shown, click the “Browse” button in the lower right-hand corner of the window and navigate to the location of the WinRAR executable. It is usually located here: C:Program FilesWinRARWinRAR.exe
5. Navigate in the WinRAR window to the file you need to edit.
6. Open the file, edit it, save it, close it.
7. Click “OK” in the window WinRAR pops up asking you if you’d like to update the file in the archive.
8. You’re done!

Ahh… now my files all look alike!