Calibre Repository Moved

Thomas Schraitle — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 07:57:38 +0000

Maybe not everybody knows it or it may be a bit too late, but nevertheless… the Calibre repository on home:thomas-schraitle:calibre has been moved to Documentation:Tools. It was necessary due to some internal reorganisation. The new location is now the official devel project.

Have fun!

Checking EPUBs

Thomas Schraitle — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 11:42:18 +0000

EPUBs are getting more and more important thesedays. If you believe the essays from well-informed magazines, they will develop into a standard for book and text consumption as MP3 did for audio.

Today, lots of e-book readers are available and more will be ready in the future. Apart from the problem, if an e-book reader supports EPUB, the EPUB file itself has to adhere to certain specifications. This is the task for epubcheck, a commandline utility which validates an EPUB file.

The RPM package can be found in my OBS repository home:thomas-schraitle as usual. To use it, just run epubcheck with your EPUB file and see what it finds.

Have fun!

Reading EBooks With Calibre

Thomas Schraitle — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:21:15 +0000

Back in the (should I say: old?) days books were created from dead trees. Now, with the raise of different reading devices, we can read them digitally. Thanks to Kovid Goyal we can enjoy ebooks with the Calibre reader also on your ordinary PC or laptop.

Features

So what’s are the virtues of Calibre? Here are a few:

Calibre view your ebooks, displays table of contents (if available), can set bookmarks, and can copy text from your ebook.
It can manage your ebooks by author, title, date, and other fields.
Calibre can syncronize your ebook with some e-reader device attached on the USB port.
Calibre supports a vast amount of ebook formats, including EPub, PDF, MobiPocket, and others (see Calibres’ FAQ page for the full list).
Calibre can convert ebook formats. If you have downloaded or bought an ebook in a format that your reader does not understand, Calibre can convert it into something more useful with the any2epub tool.

And a lot more features.

Usability Issues

As you could see, Calibre is a very useful tool. However, Calibre’s main window is a bit strange (see screenshot): it wastes the available space and the icons plus their texts are far too big.

The Calibre Main Window

Unfortunately one of the most used icons, View, appears to be the last in the menu bar. This is extremely annoying when you have limited screen resolution, for example on laptops and so called netbooks. Or you want to have only a fraction of your screen occupied by Calibres’ window. The result is the same: the menu bar displays a fraction of its icons and the important View icon disappears. You have to click on the » icon to overlay the rest of the menu bar to reach the View icon.

Viewing my book as EPub

Apart from this usability issue, it does its job—viewing ebooks—very well. For example, this is a screenshot of the 2nd editon of my book in EPub (see 2nd screenshot). As far as I can see, it supports table of contents, CSS, and a lot more, all created by the latest DocBook stylesheets with EPub support.

More EBooks to discover…

If you are interested in trying out Calibre, there are a couple of interesting webpages where you can download free ebooks. Look at www.feedbooks.com, www.gutenberg.org, or use your favorite Internet search engine. Sometimes they offer different formats. Look for EPub or MobiPocket formats as these are “reflowable”.

Installation

Calibre can be downloaded from my openSUSE repository:

Version: 10.3
Version: 11.0
Version: 11.1

Thanks Kovid for this software!