Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
babluboy.github.io
babluboy.github.io
Why would an ebook reader even try to do the navigation for me? It should display an ebook, and I'll take care of the rest.
If it's showing me the file system, it's redundant. If it's showing me the "library" according to its own logic, then it breaks the consistency. And it makes my life so much harder (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?).
I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.
How are you going to play music you've added in the last three years, but not heard for a month, from the "Latin" genre, with two or more stars, using only the file system? With an iTunes smart playlist, it's trivial.
In Calibre it's trivial to sort the books by Title, Author, or (my self-defined and filled) Genre column.
How would you even start to manage photos in the file system? By name?
Photos is actually an exception for me due to the personal nature of them. I group them in directories based on date ranges and events. I don't want to upload them to some webapp or cloud storage for privacy reasons.
honest question: why would you ever like to do that?
I find calibre unusable because of these things. I just have one epub file and I want to read it. However, the damn program forces me to "initialize my library" and other bullshit.
BeOS actually solved this 20 years ago with its file system BFS. Haiku is an open source reimplementation of BeOS that recently progressed from (high quality) alpha releases to its first beta.
Calibre doesn't obfuscate / embed the book files. They copy under a folder with Author's name. You can pretty easily access the original file pretty quickly. Maybe you can configure Calibre to use your directory structure without modifying it.
BTW, I don't understand the use case of reading ebooks on a desktop or laptop instead of on a phone or tablet (or eink reader.) Is this really common? I can imagine reading some technical ebook at my computer while working at my desk, but not fiction or anything else.
Unfortunately, not everyone has all the screens, and not all phone screens are big enough to read novels and such. I'd rather read a book in my bed on my laptop screen and take notes quickly rather than an older phone and try to write on its keyboard.
Also, e-ink readers' screen refresh rate prevents taking extensive notes on the books. You can underline just fine, but longer notes are a bit hard.
Last but not the least, comic books in CBZ/CBR format really begs for a quality color display, since colored comics is half the fun in the comics. :D
Your library.
> powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader).
Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have started to do that to some degree.
But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled Garden-Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database, offering flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers are normally lacking.
The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas, the dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break through the hierachy.
> (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.
Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks.
> Your library.
Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories. Now ebook readers came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times, because it needs to index first.
>> powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader).
> Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have started to do that to some degree.
grep and find works quite well for most work loads and are fast, why not enhance (or fork) them to support ebook formats?
Instead ebook readers came along and reinvented filesystems, because users cannot be trusted to organize their book collection themselves.
> But they still lack the "alternate view" on your library. Those Walled Garden-Apps that work with librarys are more like a relational database, offering flexible selections and content-optimized views that filemanagers are normally lacking.
And at the same time omit very useful information that normal file managers show. (File creation/write/access time, size, full file name, etc.)
> The major difference is really just if you want a static and inflexible organization, or something dynamic. And usually with heterogeneous datas, the dynamic approach is better for consuming beacuse it allows you to break through the hierachy.
As I said, with long indexing times. I had ~50000 books on a ebook reader once and that broke it. Just because there are files stored, that should not slow down the system or even make it completely unusable.
Instead they should just access the filesystem directly, then those problems don't even arise.
>> (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?). > I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.
> Just select your books and export them. Calibre can export to a device, but also just a local directory. Calibre in that regard is one of the better gardens. Very flexible and powerful. Just the UI sucks.
Calibre is a pretty big application and they are not an ebook reader primarily. Their main feature is the library. And they spend many man years of development to improve that and it does work quite well.
But very few ebook applications and handheld readers have the same resources to implement a similarly powerful library functionality. Instead they have half backed solutions that make finding and organizing the library more difficult then if they would have simply used a standard file manager and grep/find/...
IMO an application that lets you just open epubs and other ebook formats and render them correctly just like so many pdf viewer do, without any half assed library functionality duck taped on to it, is highly sought after.
So you do understand the general concept of a library. Then you also understand the limitations of directories and how much work goes in maintaining this system.
> Now ebook readers came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times, because it needs to index first.
I don't think Ebook-readers started this. ITunes had this first I think, or whatever app ITunes copied from back then.
> grep and find works quite well for most work loads and are fast, why not enhance (or fork) them to support ebook formats?
Doesn't solve the problem. Grep and find don't give a useful interface for elaborated tasks. They also don't support metadata which are not supported by a fileformat, meaning "external" metadata.
> And at the same time omit very useful information that normal file managers show. (File creation/write/access time, size, full file name, etc.)
Depends on the application, and the user. Not all of those information are useful for everyone. Calibre for example has good support for filemanagers. Each entry has a link to open the folder with the ebooks. The whole library is saved as a folder-hierachy with metadate extrated into seperate files. The Database-View is just an additional layer.
> As I said, with long indexing times. I had ~50000 books on a ebook reader once and that broke it. Just because there are files stored, that should not slow down the system or even make it completely unusable.
Indexing is a neccessary tradeoff for gaining power. The alternative would be to constantly scan all files, making every single task slower. grep and find have their price too.
> But very few ebook applications and handheld readers have the same resources to implement a similarly powerful library functionality. Instead they have half backed solutions that make finding and organizing the library more difficult then if they would have simply used a standard file manager and grep/find/...
Oh yeah, I guess grep on an eReader would be a real pleasure to use...
> IMO an application that lets you just open epubs and other ebook formats and render them correctly just like so many pdf viewer do, without any half assed library functionality duck taped on to it, is highly sought after.
Those applications exist. Calibre even comes with one out of the box. Not their fault if you just start the library and not the reader.
I am not against an index or library in addition to the file hierarchy, but I am against a library or index replacing a directory listing.
Both perspectives are very valuable!
Also a full text search (grep) or (more or less simple) file search (find) are useful in addition to a library.
To reiterate, for me it seems that itunes and ebook reader generation of devices and applications don't seem to value custom directory organization.
> Those applications exist. Calibre even comes with one out of the box. Not their fault if you just start the library and not the reader.
While the library part of calibre is very good, the reader part is not so great, but that just might be because a library application is much more difficult to implement than the reader, so bad UI can be looked over there, but not in the reader. Otherwise I agree that this the application of choice for reading ebooks on Linux desktop.
Do you primarily or only use one computer or one os?
I'm on 3 different OSes regularly, over 5 different computers counting ones at work. For me, the effort to setup custom directory organization is a complete waste of time unless structure and tags can easily travel between computers, filesystems, and OSes.
Letting the app (Calibre for books, Mendeley Desktop for pdf's) organize however it wants lets me just clone the directory and preserve tags, which is actually what is important to me (or in the case of Mendeley, log in and sync documents/tags). I'm not a music listener at work or I'd just let an app organize that too if it syncs my tags.
They can -- they're just files.
Fbreader lets me browse the filesystem, or search by different metadata.
I have at least two dimensions I'm dealing with: title, and file type. Really though, it's nice to also organize by genre, and year.
I also dislike most of these walled garden library apps, and they are usually poorly written and obtuse. I would love an app that can scan my existing ebook repo, and then also create an index database, and make the books available on my mobile device.
One pattern for sharing my rigidly structured data from my desktop to my iPad, is to just share my working tree over Dropbox, because I use git-annex for my file collections. That way, I have automatic syncing of the files, but also the safety of snapshots. If I do want to incorporate a change I make on a mobile device, I can simply make a commit on my desktop, but if some poorly written app decides to start screwing with my metadata, I can re-check the files out. OSX Preview.app is infamous for this.
And scripts that 'index' the books and create a directory structure of the metadata (like tags, series, publication date etc.) containing symlinks to the real books.
Yes, because it's expensive and has little value for the user. A guided application, streamlinend for well defined purpose is always simpler to create and cheaper to maintain. There is a reason why free software is usually more open for user-custimization.
> While the library part of calibre is very good, the reader part is not so great
Indeed. I thinks it's mainly because calibre is mostly used for feeding devices and maintaining and manipulating the library, less for actual reading books on desktop-PCs.
In the early days of Mac OSX, iTunes actually did a great job of just organizing your music collection for you. It would sort your music into a nested hierarchy by artist, album, and track title based on the metadata on the file, which you could edit with iTunes. When you changed stuff around it would actually modify where the files were saved in the library folder.
It worked great. It was structured logically in your iTunes library, but organizing and tagging your iTunes library also wound up structuring your file system logically automatically. So there was never this sense of a pretty veneer over a messy clusterfuck underneath. The whole thing is designed to keep things tidy and organized.
>> Your library.
> Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories. Now ebook readers came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times, because it needs to index first.
This has been a complaint of mine with music programs for, literally I think, decades. If you need to overlay some metadata that's fine, but in that case at least index it by header checksums or something, not by file names and paths! (Especially not absolute paths.) Please respect my organizational choices and make sure I can rename and move things around without worrying about "ruining" the database.
Thankfully, there are also full-text indexers like spotlight and tracker.
The advantage of integrated solutions is that you have less work to replicate your workspace on a new device, often even no work at all. How well does that work with indexer? Spotlight does not even work indepedant of the platform, tracker is Gnome-ware, does it integrate with KDE or Non-KDE?
The UI can be improved quite a bit, check out icon packs like this one: https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-calibre-th...
For me, that looks pretty good, comparable to qBitorrent or 7zip.
Calibres menus, configuration and the general flow is very messy. Partly because calibre is doing so many different things, but partly also because it's just very unpolished.
I'm sure there's a "dropbox is just rsync" type answer, but this is for regular users
I hate library/playlist oriented stuff. I have everything organized in folders and files, with good filenames. Since I have in my collection a lot of unkown, old or rare media, most programs are not able to find out what it it or even tag them wrong!
I still use foobar. On my kodi setup, I navigate almost everything via file browser. I spent a lot of time finding a decent folder oriented audio player for android.
I suppose that the "library" model is what most people prefer since most modern media apps use that in some form or another. Or maybe it is because of Steve Jobs reality distortion field ( https://oleb.net/blog/2012/06/steve-jobs-on-the-file-system/ ). Still, I hate all these apps attempting to hide the filesystem from me.
A filesystem is perfectly fine, if used correctly, for the average ebook reader use-case.
If you have 10 million ebooks and need to run 100 complex searches per second then you need an RDBMS.
When your collection grows though, issues start to show up. Being able to sort, and find a book based on other information becomes much more useful: date of publication, genre, custom tags, etc... While you could always integrate these in your filename/directory structure, with the help of symlinks, it's very cumbersome to manage and use.
Maybe if you just dump a large number of unsorted files in place and do nothing with them. With a decent file manager and an hour or so, you can add many books and symlink them to the metadata directory with no issue.
Alternatively you can use a program's built-in library with no time cost to yourself...
An hour? You've made my case. It takes at most a couple of minutes for importing hundreds of books in Calibre. Metadata retrieval is automatic (from the file itself and/or online). Everything happens in a few clicks.
Yes, and I want to be able to do that with all my books, not just the ones that the ebook reader can handle.
I just move around my file system like normal and then open them in light weight readers like Zathura. Browsing is the same as any other directory, the files open immediately, it works offline and it's easy to sync between devices.
I apply this same strategy to MP3s too.
My mother in law knows that, conceptually and practically, when she taps the Kindle icon on her tablet she will open her collection of books. Within that full-screen app, she is intending to do one of several things: find a book to read, then read that book.
She doesn't really like the filesystem on her imac. She much prefers that all the files associated with a given activity are readily available when she is doing that particular activity. Gallery -> Photos. Library -> Kindle. TV Shows -> Netflix. She doesn't really think about how each of those search and organization functions act differently between apps.
We all do the same, to a great or lesser degree. Orgzly has my org-mode files right there. Microsoft RDP client beta has a group of all the RDP sessions I use right there. Outlook has all emails and calendar items.
I absolutely suffer when my filesystem is chaotic, which it often is: but then again so is my job, doing systems admin, devops, code builds, puppet/ansible/chef stuff, etc etc. Being able to quickly find things in a freeform manner is very, very useful. (I use 'fzf' and zsh for commands and directories, and 'mdfind' (on mac) for its faster-than-grep file search)
What directory would I put my copy of Stephen King's It in? My Stephen King folder? My horror folder? 1986? Fiction?
The underlying file system view really doesn't matter. It's the abstraction on top of that where all the interesting things happen.
You're right that this often causes problems. Anybody who has tried to salvage an iTunes library can attest to that.
However you're downplaying the positives to having a metadata database, and you're also ignoring the teeming masses who don't care about the layout of the file system as long as it's displayed in the app.
Same thing with pdf's - I used to keep a bunch of docs in my own subdir, until it got to be 1000+ pdf's and I discovered Mendeley Desktop and its tagging feature. Now I can find stuff much faster.
Same thing with my music collection, same thing my with photos.
Your needs may be minimal enough and your computer skills sufficient enough so that you get by with the filesystem, but I would venture to say the average user is much better off with an app/library method of organization. e.g., I can't fathom organizing a non-trivial photo collection via the filesystem only. I know I'm better off with the app/library method of organizing data, something I came to realize after my initial resistance.
We have uses with over 30,000 eBooks in their libraries and will be able to support your collection without issues. BookFusion allows you to easily upload, read and organize(tags and categories) your eBooks.
Your entire Calibre eBook collection will be available across all your devices while keeping your bookmarks, comments, highlights and reading progress synced.
More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
We even have a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your entire collection or only eBooks you are interested in.
https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre
PS: I am the founder of BookFusion
No, come on, be fair, let's replicate the capabilities of the file system: You can sort them both by ISBN and by size.
I'm not even sure where to start. But that you can't even envision a few reasons why someone would use something is very limiting. At least on an empathy level but probably on a professional product-design level as well.
I can certainly appreciate your point when the software's backing database is unusable and human-unfriendly, and this is supposedly the reason why you hate Calibre, but the folder that Calibre stores my 12k books in and it's nicely organized. The other day I even Airdropped it to my friend where he imported it into macOS' Books.app.
With that said, I would be happy if you could take BookFusion for a spin and let me know if you have any feedback. Our users have libraries with over 30,000 eBooks and as a result we will have no issues with your collection.
BookFusion allows you to easily upload, organize and read all your eBooks regardless of format on iOS, Android and Web enabled devices.
More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
BookFusion also has a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your eBook collection. https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre
PS: I am the founder of BookFusion and would be happy to hear any feedback that you might have
Unfortunately, I could not find anywhere on your site that indicated the cost associated with an individual user account. (Free to signup, of course, but how long is that trial, or what limits will I face? and then how much money will this subscription service cost me?)
End-users have serious account fatigue, and I seriously debated whether I should bother signing up for the site and create yet another login to a web app I might or might not want to use. Please, just be up front about pricing, free trials, limitations, requirements, etc.
If you have a 7-day free trial and I'm currently busy, I won't have time to kick the wheels before I'd need to pay. If you instead limit the number of books or the storage space I can use, just tell me so I can decide if it's worth bothering to test it out. As far as I can tell, you might or might not have a limit for a new/free user, but no idea what that is.
Finally, I see in the settings that you offer an early bird subscriber deal, at $4.99/mo (vs $9.99/mo) and $39.99/yr (vs $60/yr), for unlimited storage. I think you might have better luck with a tiered setup. Someone with a lot of ebooks might find $40/year to be a great deal, but most users likely don't have that large of a collection - they're looking for more of an ease of use and convenience factor. Take advantage of that, and then allow them to move up and give you more money once their collection grows.
$10/year = 4GB storage or 2000 ebooks? (count # of books, and not storage, to make it seem less technical?) $20/year = 8GB storage or 4000 ebooks? $40/year = 20GB storage or __? $60/year = unlimited
or $10/$30/$60 year, with 2000/10,000/unlimited? and only allow monthly payment as an option for the $30/$60 levels?
at $10/year, it would be an impulse buy for most readers, and then you not only have a paying relationship with them right away, you have a whole year to demonstrate the ease of use and utility of the product.
I think that the problem is that a file system typically represents a single type of hierarchy. Maybe you have your books in the file system arranged by topic->author->book, but other arrangements like topic->year->book, book->year (for editions) or author->book->author->book->... (for citations) can be useful. Maybe you want to list books that relate to a set of multiple topics written by either of two specific authors.
In Unix you can solve this by using symbolic links, which may become tedious to maintain (but less so by using automated tools). Generally, you can sort of address it by including meta information in the file names (like the warez scene does), but that is tedious when you have a lot of potentially relevant meta information.
The benefits of throwing all the information into a relational database and querying into that instead of a regular PC file system is that you can define the desired hierarchy and what meta-data is important on the fly and effectively create a file system (in the pre-computer sense) and perform a search at the same time.
I haven't looked closely enough at this software to say that its "library" actually addresses these concerns, but for large libraries there are obvious benefits to 1) Using multiple hierarchies or faceted classification for information query 2) defining such hierarchies or sets of classifying categories on the fly. These aren't new solutions, and fundamentally the organization of information in a library is not a new problem, so I wouldn't call your position old school.
If by "this context" you mean exactly the use case you describe, then yes. If you are always looking for books you already know of and can name, there is little point in further classification.
Another potential use case is that I have tens of thousands of books and I am looking for English-language fictional books about scientists and monsters by authors born in the 18th century.
Again, I haven't looked closely at the app and chances are that it doesn't really help in that use case either, but I meant to explain the concept of a "library" to someone who did not understand it, and why a simple hierarchical file system may be an insufficient abstraction for library classification in general.
It's very similar to Bookworm in this regard.
The main reason we do it is repository integrity.
We can replicate it easily with the cloud and enable real time collaboration.
You can also keep the files on disk if you want and in their original directories as we use a hard link.
Essentially, the library system and the traditional filesystem are the same, to the extent that they both filter and group files by a select group of criteria. In the case of the filesystem, the criteria are file path, sizes, date added, etc. In the case of a library system, the criteria are specific types metadata that are meaningful for the type of media it manages (genres and artists for music, publishers and categories for books, etc.). Their features do intersect, and you can have both worlds in one system with some hacks, but the convenience and design also matter.
For me, I read ebooks but don’t hoard them, so I don’t need Calibre to manage my petite amount of epubs -- folders and filenames are enough. But I do listen to a lot of music, so I can’t manage efficiently without a music library software like iTunes. A person who is a voracious reader but rare listener, however, may have a choice just opposite to mine, which is also completely reasonable.
You also don’t use Photoshop for browsing your images, it’s possible but it’s not what it’s made for.
While Calibre has a full management, editing and authoring suite, it also has a nice internal reader with reading features.
It's not like the Photoshop, but rather the ACDSee suite, which comes with a full fledged image browser and viewer.
I can't comment on the Python2.x dependencies though.
Also looks like any Python3 patch doesn't break the current Calibre build is welcome indeed.
Additionally, there is the problem of compability. Configuration in Calibre is python-code, and on several corners the user can mod stuff. Any transition would need to make sure to not brake things to hard.
Python2 as a platform will slowly die and any application depending on it will die with it. Though, this won't become a serious problem in the next years, but more like 5-10+ years.
It's sad, but the reality now.
But calibre is desktop-software, it depends on the OS, the GUI-Framework and whats more... Though, it's actually only a bigger deal for linux, beacuse on Windows and Mac OS is custom to deliver compiled versions from the Project itself. Also there is not wayland-situation on windows and Mac OS, which might break GUI-Libs. But as Calibre has so many different gears it's depending on, there is a good chance that something will break after a certain point.
> Someone like Red Hat will probably keep maintaining Python 2 for at least some years more.
Actually, Red Hat is already dropping python2 for their next enterprise-version as I read. They will probably still have a somewhat maintainend version available somehow, but it's obvious that python2 is slowly phasing out now. And many remaining companies are now starting transition too as EOL is near.
At this point you can already can predict that python2 will have reached minimal levels of usage in 5 years.
I'm not at my main workstation at home, so I cannot compare now, but it's a very strange situation.
Only one is usually lacking. I think it's mobi or epub, but never bother to pin it down because I just combine then in one entry anyway, and then the metadata will be merged together.
Calibre has usually no problem with extracting metadata from files, independant from the source.
In the import/add books settings, there is an option to use the filename instead of the metadata. Try changing that?
Its RAM requirement is more than the capacity of my first hard drive, but it's not in the league of Chrome, Slack or Atom. There are many wasteful applications out there doing much much less with much more resources.
Also, I had to drop Calibre due to the large number of Python 2 and imagemagik dependencies that have a maintenance cost when it comes to pulling updated packages & so on.
Making Calibre modular would have helped greatly but the author never cared.
Huge amount of RAM usage is subjective term. For me, Chrome, Slack and Atom are memory hogs. While I do not find the RAM usage of Calibre optimal, I think its RAM usage is reasonable with that feature set for me. Eclipse is also using ~1.1GB of RAM, but it's not a memory hog from my perspective, because I get what I give as productivity and features that I actually use and benefit.
>... ignoring bookworm and other more reasonable applications.
No, I'm not. Above, here [0], I said that Bookworm is a nice application, but my needs are different. Also, I compared Atom with another functionally-similar text application and said that similar applications (like BBEdit) use ~60MB, but Atom uses 660MB out of the box.
Similarly, since Bookworm doesn't provide the features that I need, installing it would be moot, since it'll sit unused on my disk, actually wasting disk space from my point of view. However, this doesn't make Bookworm a bad application. If it provides the functionality one needs, then I'm happy for them. Also its user interface is elegant and minimal, this another plus for Bookworm.
> Also, I had to drop Calibre due to the large number of Python 2 and imagemagik dependencies that have a maintenance cost when it comes to pulling updated packages & so on.
I don't know your OS and setup, and can't comment on that. However, major distros are doing the required maintenance, so many people are just installing it on their systems.
> Making Calibre modular would have helped greatly but the author never cared.
I don't know internal architecture of Calibre, so I can't say anything about this issue. However modularity has its own set of benefits and problems.
Would be happy if you could take BookFusion for a spin. BookFusion allows you to easily upload and organize your eBooks while being able to read on iOS, Android and Desktop(via Web)
https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
There is also a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your Calibre eBook collection.
There's a fork of FBReader on F-Droid called simply 'Book Reader' which is being actively developed (last release 2019-02-08.) Might be worth trying out.
Git repo is here: https://gitlab.com/axet/android-book-reader
Working on open source is fantastic but most realistic projects are sponsored in some way or form. I doubt that sponsorship works works for an eReader app, so this is a good solution.
TLDR; our fellow developer deserves to get paid for their clearly awesome work.
I agree, but it highlights the many-small-cuts problem
$5 for an eReader, then a mapping app, file manager, photo editor, mail client... the list of developers deserving support is longer than most people can afford. Eventually a choice has to be made to prioritise. For many people that will mean that a less-used category of app can be fulfilled from F-Droid instead of paying for a more-polished one.
Is $100 too much for lifetime access to these apps?
They took an open source app I loved, closed the source, added features I don't need (and ads I definitely don't), making it run slower on my 6-year-old Nexus 7 I use as a reader.
I agree with supporting development, but it was feature-complete as an open source app. The roadmap for 3.0, 3.1, and 3.x add nothing of interest to me[1]. I'll happily move to the Book Reader app that someone else mentioned, and contribute anything to it that I can.
[1] https://fbreader.org/content/fbreader-3x-android-planned-fea...
More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
PS: Founder of BookFusion. Please let me know if you have any feedback
BookFusion also has a Calibre plugin to allow you to easily sync your library. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre
PS: Founder of BookFusion. Would be happy to hear any feedback that you might have
BookFusion also have a Calibre plugin to allow you to easily sync your eBook collection. More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre
PS: I am the founder of BookFusion
You can make all the ebook readers you want. Until we find an easier way to make non-Amazon ebooks easier to read, these aren't going to catch on.
I buy from Kobo, no DRM, plain epub. Big selection.
I buy from a bunch of authors' own websites or small publishing platforms (like bookviewcafe.com) because an even higher percentage of the price goes to the author, and nobody ever pays to put DRM on their own book.
The only choices are proprietary Kindle format or PDF and EPUB with a very restrictive Adobe DRM scheme.
[0]: https://www.ebooks.com/SearchApp/SearchResults.net?term=jan+...
So this is mostly in people's head, because when they have to get something that supports Adobe Digital Editions they're thinking that they're being put out "because DRM", whereas when they have to get something from Amazon to read a Kindle book they're thinking "because Kindle", which is just giving Amazon a pass for no good reason.
To be clear I'm against all DRM, I just want the comparison to be correct.
For example hexchat an irc client seems to use about 50-60MB of ram.
Slack by contrast out of the box appears to use 1.2GB of memory. There are at present 12 applications open on my machine. If they all used over a GB each something would be starving given that I only have 8. Note please that most machines still have 8GB or less.
Do you really not understand why people are biased against electron or are you pretending to for effect?
We can't afford a whole list of apps all hogging resources simultaneously.
For simple tasks, a full fledged, programming capable text editor can fit into ~60MBs. Atom needs 660 just at the start. With that amount of RAM usage, I even cannot open large files as reliably as vim for example.
Calibre's e-book reader uses ~100MBs when opened. It runs independent of the main Calibre app, in its own process. Again, an Electron app will be heavier here.
No it isn't. For example EPUB 3 supports all kinds of dynamic content including music and video and javascript.
But again, I'd just include libwebkit (or similar) with a JS engine into my app and be happy.
All the desktop or chrome apps I've tried miss crucial obvious functionality, or are so ugly and painful to use they make me want to cry and throw things.
Thank you so much for making this project, it looks amazing, can't wait to try it out!
Edit:
I was unable to install it on ubuntu 18.04 because it requires libgranite5. To fix this I did:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip.scott/spice-up-daily
sudo apt install libgranite5
Now it works.
Feedback:
This app doesn't allow me to scroll through pages? I can only switch between them with arrow keys? That's a huge bummer, pretty much a dealbreaker for me. Everything else looks great.
Oh, and looks like it completely breaks PDF formatting for me. I love that it adds a dark mode, but it makes them pretty much unreadable. Table of content's broken as well, chapter names replaced with Content #1, Content #2, etc. And some fonts are missing, hard to figure out which, but I can't read some text in the pdf because of this.
Please fix these things, I really wish to use this app!
My next Kindle will probably be the Oasis model as it has hardware buttons for page turn. It's an expensive upgrade, but these things tend to last me a long, long time.
Yeah, I should have been more precise. I meant "randomly switches to the next or previous page", and of course it's not random either, it's because a fly landed on it (seriously happened to me regularly in some regions), or a drop of sweat fell on it, or the scarf gently brushed over it (different locations, obviously), etc.
Also, it's just nice when I can hold it in the middle (not only the edge) without it switching page. The hardware side buttons were perfectly fine, and (as the other poster observed) are now a ridiculously expensive premium feature!
Unfortunately, a used Kindle 5 is now sometimes offered more expensively than it used to cost new.
> tend to last me a long, long time
Yes, they do - lamentably I tend to lose them. That's why I'm stacking up on the old one :-)
Hardware keys are now apparently a premium feature and you now need to spend nearly 200 euros more to have them. All I want is an updated version of Kindle 4 with an added backlight (sidelight?).
Can anyone recommend any alternative e-readers that have hardware page turners and a backlight that costs at most around 100 dollars?
It will help if it is just as much feature rich as Bookworm and just as much easy to use as Bookworm.
Calibre, is therefore ruled out.
You will be able to read your eBooks on Windows but also on your mobile devices while having your eBook collection, bookmarks, comments and highlights synced.
You can learn more at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
Nothing else googling has the required features this one has.
Thank you and Thank HN for superseding Google!
You can use Calibre to convert the ePub to PDF and then import.
ePub is used a lot more than I would have thought.
Initially we might just convert the ePub to PDF.
Right now I'm working on making Polar easier to use. I think initial users get confused and I'm trying to fix that.
Additionally we're working on a web version but I think that's 1-2 weeks away.
They have a lot of interesting concepts here : https://www.deviantart.com/elementary-art/favourites/
It make me really happy that the elementary projet finally manage to provide sexy apps for Linux.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bookworm-team/bookworm
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm
In case of issues related to missing libgranite package, add the Elementary PPA as shown below and re-try. The Elementary PPA can be removed after Bookworm is installed.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install com.github.babluboy.bookworm
I'd trust PPAs more if they didn't have such broad possibility of misuse. For example, if I add a PPA that only contains package A, I should at least be warned if that PPA tries to install or upgrade package B. apt will only display that package B needs to be installed/upgraded, it won't inform me that it originated from that PPA.
I applaud elementary OS for not bundling software-properties-common by default (a package that allows you to run add-apt-repository). If you decide to install it, you should at least be forced to make an effort to open such possibility of misuse.
The question is whats the risk profile/benefit.
The ppa like many other is hosted on launchpad.net owned by canonical.
If Canonical is compromised you are probably boned any way you slice it. If the developer is compromised you are probably boned. This leaves the fact that the devs account on launchpad could be taken over and used as an attack vector which quite frankly seems like the lessor risk.
You have already undertaken the greater risk that the dev or whomever inherits/acquires access to their account is or becomes malicious or incompetent especially given that is not now or will it be audited unless it becomes an official part of the Ubuntu repos.
This means that if the bookworm software in version 17 starts to come with a crypto miner you will only become aware of this if it hits hacker news and you happen to read the story whereas were it part of the Ubuntu repos Canonical would be apt to publish this warning via official channels.
If you have 835 packages you have 835 potential sources of issues but if they are all vetted by canonical then you have 1 source of fixes/warnings. If you add 17 ppas you now have 18 channels and 17 may be less diligent than canonical is. This situation isn't much improved if you have 17 github repos that you periodically pull from unless you have both the skill and the time to audit the result in depth.
It's focused around incremental reading and suspend and resume of your reading but also supports annotations (highlights, etc).
I also designed it for people like the HN crowd so it's insanely hackable.
Biggest thing I'm working on now is onboarding to make it easier to use and a web version.
Would you be willing to report back later about how you did financially? I'm eminently curious about the economic model and whether it could work. A case-study would be awesome :-)
It supports Support epub, pdf, mobi, chm, cbr, cbz, umd, fb2, txt, html, rar, zip or OPDS
Its nicely customizable, takes up the whole screen when running including status area, has a night mode, can autorotate or pin the orientation.
Personally I really like using it plus calibre companion to sync files with my computer.
I copy-paste some sentence from a book into my note taking app, and search for that same text on my other device. Note-taking is easier to sync than reading positions themselves.
Calibre saves the reading position inside the metadata of the book, so you'd need a way to re-download the book every time you open it.
We're working on both mobile support and web at the same time.
The cool thing is that the multi-device cloud sync support will also work with the web version.
You can learn more at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
PS: Founder of BookFusion
I have added this to the development roadmap and you will see it deployed by Q2 this year
going through the features for bookworm, I didn't know I wanted some of those (ex: annotations, metadata/tags mainly to make it easier to search later on, etc)
Calibre insists on copying all my books to a local directory (~/Calibre Library). My laptop has a 128GB SSD, so that will never work. Will Bookworm do this too?
I would prefer it just create a local folder for the metadata, then reference the documents on the network share. But if you want to write the metadata to the same directory as the books, that's cool too.
As an aside (and also as a small request), I miss the Kindle for PC app's ability to easily display a book in a 2-up view. To get two pages to show now, you have to change it into multi-column view and then mess with the page width and the window size until it looks good. I'd love to have another eBook reader on my computer that has a nice two-page view. Kindle Cloud Reader shows a perfect two-page view, but you can only use it for books you've bought from Amazon.
Thanks for sharing.
BookFusion also has a Calibre plugin that will allow you to easily sync your entire eBook collection to the cloud.
More information at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
PS: Founder of BookFusion. Will appreciate any feedback that you might have.
1. It has updates ALL THE TIME
2. It has a billion features and I only need one (moving books to/from the device)
Unfortunately, after looking over the feature list and realizing that it's for Linux, I realized that this is more of a replacement for Books on OS X -- a local ebook reader.
I would think calibre on a local note remote filesystem would perform acceptably.
The portion that you want readily available on mobile could be easily synced wirelessly via calibre companion. Note that you can select a query for syncing and include the current status on the wireless device in the query.
Give me all the books tagged foo AND where ondevice:false
But I don’t have direct access to my library the next few days.
Calibre can handle libraries much larger than mine as long as you remember to close the tag browser and such (takes waaay more time to start Calibre if tag browser is opened).
The biggest problem is that on startup bookworm loads all book covers one after another. It takes forever until every cover loaded for huge libraries. At around 2.5k ebooks the interface becomes so laggy that it’s unusable. Scrolling is no longer possible. I gave up testing this with 5k ebooks.
Another thing I dislike about this application is the inability to adjust the width of the columns in the list view. There are some books in my library with very long titles. Bookworm seems to use the longest title to set the width of the title column for all books.
The memory usage got to above 11% when idling after starting the App with 5k books.
This is almost entirely because Windows 8 has the best touch-screen browser available on any platform: Internet Explorer Metro Edition (from a UX perspective, the actual browser internals are horrible). I've also written all my own server-side componentry[1].
- Freda for ebooks
- Latermark for articles stored using Pocket
- Libby for ebooks borrowed from my local library
- SumatraPDF for PDF documents and CBZ comics
The tablet form factor lets me read while in bed and, as long as I occasionally pay attention to my surroundings, while walking.
Take BookFusion for a spin and let me know what you think. BookFusion allows you to easily read your entire eBook collection and sync your bookmarks, reading progress, highlights and comments across all devices. BookFusion has native Android, iOS and Web apps.
It syncs all elements of all of my activities across all platforms (Windows, OS X, Android, iOS) that I use. My main issue with it is that I can't download the stuff I uploaded, so it's not really good as a storage/backup solution, but that's fairly minor.
Would be interesting to hear your feedback if you decide to try BookFusion
Does BookFusion let me re-download books I've uploaded?
But for work and hobbies I am flooded with PDF's (some spec sheets, but a lot of actual technical books). I tried different eBook readers, tablets etc. And I have found out I prefer reading them on my hires desktop monitor, where I can google details etc. And it's there that I usually need them.
Also comics. For some reason I prefer to look at them on my monitor than on tablet. Not sure why, because tablets seem like tailor made for this.
You are able to easily send books to your Kindle from the same app using our Send To Kindle feature.
More details at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
PS: I am the founder of BookFusion and would appreciate any feedback that you might have.
I would like to introduce you to Bookfusion, a multi-platform reader that allows you to organize and read your eBooks across Desktops(Windows,Linux, iOS) and Desktop via web and on Android and iOS devices with a native app.
More details at: https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
Quick Overview Of Features
Cloud Library – create your own eBook cloud library to manage all your eBooks in one place without the need to run your own servers. Upload your entire collection.
Read on Any Device – Read your eBooks on the devices you have today and the ones you will have tomorrow. Read on Android, IOS and Web (Linux,Windows & OSX)
Integrated Mobile & Web Reader – Have a truly seamless experience by using the same app that you use to organize and manage your eBook library to read your books as well
Any Format - Read any book regardless of format from PDF, MOBI, EPUB, TXT, DOC and others.
Export & View Highlits - A single interface to view all highlights made across all your eBooks. Export your highlights from the web interface via CSV Sync across all devices – Sync your reading progress, bookmarks and highlights across all devices. Pick up where you left off.
Organize your eBooks - Easily change the cover, title, author and assign custom tags to organize your eBook collection.
Send to Kindle – Quickly send your books to your kindle device via your kindle email with the click of a button.
Calibre plugin - Easily sync your Calibre eBook collection
Please feel free to reach out if you have any suggestions or feedback to dc@bookfusion.com
PS: Founder of BookFusion
More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library . We also plan to release a native app later this year for desktops.
PS: I am the founder of BookFusion
Calibre works for me. Why should I bother changing my setup?
For an upcoming competitor, security is only a feature if it also does everything else I need it to.
BookFusion has a Calibre plugin that allows you to easily sync your Calibre eBooks to Android, iOS and Web. The benefit is that all your entire eBook collection will now be at the tip of your finger tips and your bookmarks, highlights, reading progress and eBooks would be synced across all devices.
You can learn more at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre
PS: Founder of BookFusion and would be happy to hear any feedback you might have.
More at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/calibre
PS: I am the founder of BookFusion
EPUB is basically just HTML in a zipfile, with all the ugly warts that HTML comes with. (Attempts to enforce "pixel-perfect" design, broken accessibility, ugly fonts forced on you, etc.)
EPUB is good for publishers, I guess, but a crappy ebook format.
FB2 is a different beast, it's an extremely minimal XML dialect that encodes only semantic information and nothing else. (Basically, tags for chapters/sections/headings/verse and that's about it. The extent of the formatting allowed is 'em' and 'b' tags.)
Would you mind giving BookFusion a try and providing your frank feedback? :) We support FB2 and allow you to read your eBooks across iOS, Android and Web
https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library
PS: Founder of BookFusion