Notices

Researching ebook devices, I happened across a really nice ebook library manager and reader/viewer package that might provide a nice option to fbreader on NIT's.

The app is called CALIBRE. It has a lot of fast easy ways to not only convert formats but also build your library in an automated fashion. It can grab details for a book from the book itself (usually problematic since not all books have this info in the expected locations) but it also has the ability to reach out to ISBNdb.com to try and find all the details of the title you just imported into your library.

The thing also will synch from a built-in web server. And also uploads RSS feeds to the reader too.

I have not used much of the app at all since I only have it running on my PC but from reading all it seems to need is a Hildonized UI that hooks into the backend of the app. It is written in Python (and maybe some bolt on parts are in C++ but not sure if those are needed or even portable to an NIT OS...)

I am too long out of the coding world to even begin to look at such a port. 20yrs of coding was more than enough thank you very much. But I was hoping there might be enough interest in such an app for our NIT's.

I like it because it goes far beyond fbreader. And while I use fbreader all the time, it would be quite nice to have a more robust reader application as fbreader resources seem to be spread very thin these days. Also the ability to convert formats is sort of a nice feature. Plus it readers a lot of different formats. Of course DRM is not part of the program but that can be removed (legal in the US and a few other countries) in order to get it on the tablet.

Anyway, here is a link to the page for Calibre
http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/

If anyone out there with the ability as well as the time to see what can be done, I think folks would be really happy to have the program as a alternative to fbreader. I especially like the RSS reader side of the thing too.