Calibre and Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader. | Hacker News Reader

Calibre and Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader.

thepowerbase.com

40 pointsbigmetalman18 comments

How does this help "end DRM"? The book was already in the public domain, so the only thing you did was to take a non-DRM'd copy and convert it into a proprietary format. Just because you can take a text file and convert it into .doc doesn't mean that you've "liberated" MS Word.

If you could take an e-book purchased at B&N and freely transfer it to your Kindle or vice versa, that would be the real end of DRM.

Here's an interesting question. Suppose you bought a book by a long-dead author in an e-book store, just for the sake of convenience, or maybe because Project Gutenberg doesn't have it yet. Then you decide that you want to read it on a different vendor's e-book reader, and it happens that some software can break your e-book's DRM. If you use this software, are you violating the DMCA even though the DRM is not protecting any copyrighted material?

Yes, because you're circumventing a copyright protection mechanism. Even though the mechanism isn't, in that case, being used to protect copyrights.

IANAL and welcome corrections.

kijin,

I used "The Idiot" because that was the book that I was reading at the time of this writing. Using Calibre doesn't directly combat DRM, but the time you spend using it as a broker for consumption is time you are not spending in the B&N store buying books in a restricted format.

Though it may seem silly to read public domain books when there may be something new that you want to consume, if you can forfeit that experience of a new book, it is a great form of protest.

Calibre is awful.

Anyone who forks Calibre and gives it a useful GUI; or creates what people actually need (X-to-Y format shifting tools) without all the weird cruft that Calibre has (original article fails to mention that "add books" creates a bunch of folders in odd places) would be very popular.

Not only is the Calibre UI awful, but the HTML it generates internally (e.g, when converting to ePub) is seriously nasty. I wouldn't be surprised if it significantly slowed down book opening / display on some devices.

Part of the problem, though, is simply that there's no really good common "interchange format" for ebooks. All of the currently available formats (ePub, MOBI, HTML, PDF, FB2...) are effectively meant for direct consumption by some sort of device or another, so converting them to other formats is a messy process. I'm currently working on a simple new format for authoring (fiction) books in, as well as tools for converting this to all the other formats that matter; anyone interested in helping? :)

Would one of the markdown or similar formats serve as the middle format?

Sorry for the late response --

The format I'm planning to use as the intermediate is basically just a restricted subset of HTML. I'm primarily targeting fiction texts with this format, so advanced formatting isn't generally necessary.

Agreed. I've used Calibre for a long while now, originally for my PRS-505 and now using it for my Story HD, but sometimes it's painful doing simple tasks because of all the added kludge they've added throughout the years.

$ ebook-convert filename.wrongformat filename.rightformat

calibre calls that; so can you.

Which, alas, requires installing Calibre in the first place.

The lack of command-line tools that avoid pulling in hundreds of QT dependencies that I do not need (not to mention Calibre itself) is rather annoying.

I don't mean to sound the whiny open source guy but...

While the Calibre project has good intent, the current implementation is far from becoming a killer app. It's too slow. Took me hours to convert files. It runs out of memory frequently, randomly; can't tell which document causes the OOM. It's just not ready for prime time.

I'll be the one to say the Calibre is a phenomenal piece of work. Its ability to scrape hundreds of sites into epubs for my phone, tablets and ereader have been very helpful, especially given that I can tweak the code for a given site to get exactly what I want. I have it set up to mail my Nook Color the news every morning so I have it to read on the train on the way to work. Its ability to fire up a content server and serve up all my books eliminates my need to ever manually sync any of my readers that support fbreader on Android. It has excellent metadata editing features, and immediately made my Gutenberg collection much more attractive by going to out the web and collecting covers and metadata for them. It is very actively maintained, and has supported every reader I've thrown at it: my old Sony Pocket Reader, the new Simple Nook, the original Nook, a rooted Nook Color, the Nexus One and an Asus Tablet.

Given that it calls lots of helper utilities to do conversion between formats, it would be easy for someone that had a problem with the conversion utilities to write new ones and have those used instead.

As for Qt dependencies, Calibre is one of the few programs I don't pull from package management, since it is updated far too frequently. Instead, I have a cron job that checks for and installs new versions twice a week, and the executables live in /opt.

Can someone give me a good Sate of ePub speech and its device + environment support (iTunes, Kindle App, others)?

Observations:

  * The Calibre UI needs love (the OP arrows are a clue the UI doesn't have affordances)
  * ePub or "Gutenberg" support is not a current marketable term
  * What formats do publishers use beyond ePub?

Thanks.

I almost hate to be that guy, but

mount /mnt/book && cd /mnt/book && wget ...

work just fine for me with the Sony PRS-300. I imagine things might be a bit different with a more closed system, but this has been doing the trick for a few years.

Amazons kindle can import the .pub versions of the books from Gutenberg more or less directly (I don't have a kindle, but it works on the kindle app for Ipad).

Not .epub, but .mobi which Gutenberg provides for all its books and is the native Kindle format. (.AZW is .MOBI + encryption)

Calibre could really do with better pdf handling, especially for documents with columns.

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