
Calibre and Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader. - bigmetalman
http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/01/calibre-and-project-gutenberg-liberate-your-ereader/
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kijin
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?

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DanBC
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.

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DanBC
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.

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duskwuff
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? :)

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

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duskwuff
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.

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ww520
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.

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rpdillon
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.

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gry
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.

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sonnym
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.

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tomjen3
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).

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

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

