It looks as though the Sony Librie is about to get a second lease of life: ‘Simplereader v0.11’ has just been released. Still to be considered "work in progress", Andrew Jennings who wrote the app, reports:

It boots up to a menu now, displaying all files in the /simplereader/textfiles directory, and letting you choose which file to open. When a file is opened, you can press "Q" to close it and go back to the menu. You can copy your own text files into that directory and try opening them. It will look best if the files don't have any carriage returns within paragraphs. (i.e. each paragraph should be one continuous line.)

The Simplereader website can be found here (http://users.cableaz.com/~jenningsa/librie.html).

I've seen a lot of chatter on the wire recently about people writing their own apps for the Librie. Many of you will already be familiar with the English Firmware translation project - and if anyone has tried the Simplereader please let us know how you got on.

I've seen a lot of chatter on the wire recently about people writing their own apps for the Librie. Many of you will already be familiar with the English Firmware translation project - and if anyone has tried the Simplereader please let us know how you got on.

Indeed since past summer (2005) it was possible to logon into the librie thanks to a hack introduced during the Firmware Traslation. During some months the only available example had been a slide display project, allowing one to use the Librie as a secondary display of your main machine. Then I did a port of the netpbm graphical tools plus some extraction tools for djvu documents, but I got stuck about controlling the keyboard. Finally a month ago Jennings reverse engineered the keyboard mechanism and offered a set of C functions to use it plus a pair of utilities to query the keys from bash scripts (the latter due to compatibility with my approach). Now Jennings realeased its browsing demo plus a microSDK, and another guy has uploaded explanations about how to use PPP over the old login scheme, so you can in theory to have full navegation from a Librie-deployed browser (say, links).

Can/Will the Simplereader supports the TOC?
I wish the Librie can support TOC for LRF file for years.

I hope the Simplereader can/will support Unicode and Asian fonts.
Thanks a lot.