eReaders or e-book readers have seen rapid sales growth in recent months. Costing as little as £100, eReaders can store and nicely display hundreds of ebooks, available from booksellers’ online sites. The newest eReader models connect directly and wirelessly to the internet to access both ebooks and mp3 sound files. In traditional distance learning, teaching documents are photocopied and shipped to students often at great cost. It seems a natural step to load such documents onto an eReader, thereby gathering all handouts, plus sound and other files, into one handheld, readable package. This guide offers simple steps to configure handouts so that they can be loaded onto Sony eReaders as well as iPads and other mobile devices.

Software needed: Microsoft Word, Calibre (free, cross-platform, available from http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download. You may also need a screen shot capture utility such as MWSnap for Windows (free); for Macs this capability is built into OS X  (shift-cmd-4).

Begin with a Word document. PDF documents can work, but results are inconsistent; it’s easiest to work with Word.

1. Clean up the document—eliminate multiple line spaces and left-side indents. This is cosmetic --- the document is easier to read on the eReader if you do this.
2. Save as html; name it according to this pattern:

         the document title – authorfirstname authorsurname For example,

         Language Teaching Assessment Brief – Gabi Witthaus.html

3. In Calibre, click Add Books, browse and find your html document.
4. Highlight your newly-added “book” and click Edit Metadata. Title and author name should have come over correctly; fix if not. (Tip: in this box, whatever you type in “Series “will establish a “collection” on an eReader. You may have “Assignments” “Extra Readings” etc. This is a good way to organise documents on eReaders.)
5. Highlight your “book” and click Convert E-Books. In the upper right corner for Output format, select epub. Click OK at the bottom.

To move the document onto the eReader, launch Calibre and connect the eReader to the computer. Highlight the document you want and click Send to Device.

To move the document to the eReader without special software: connect the eReader to the computer. In My Computer, you will see the eReader as if it were an external hard drive. It often shows up as three volumes (for example, E:, F:, and G: ). Locate the epub file you created. In Windows, you should find it in My Documents, in a folder entitled with the author’s name, inside a folder entitled with the document name. On a Mac, you will find it in your home folder, in a folder called Calibre Library, then inside a folder entitled with the author’s name. Drag the file onto the eReader drive, and put it into the database – media – books folder.

.epub files can be posted onto Blackboard for students to download and load onto eReaders themselves.

A note about charts and figures: pictures and many figures will display perfectly without any special attention. However, tables created in Word do not move over very well to the eReader. It is best to “take a picture” of such a table using a screen shot capture utility, and substitute the picture you’ve just taken for the original table. Do this in step 1, and the document should then convert well.

Podcasts can be loaded and played on eReaders. Simply move the .mp3 file onto the eReader drive and put it into the database – media – audio folder. You will probably need headphones or speakers to hear the podcast.

Any file can be loaded onto an eReader, just as if it were a flash memory storage drive. Only ebooks and mp3 files can be properly handled by the eReader, but all other files can at least be stored. This might be a way to distribute to students spreadsheets, powerpoint files, movie files, free utilities and programmes. Keep in mind that the PRS 505 has a limit of 210 MB of storage. You can extend storage by adding an inexpensive SD memory card.