Impserv - Storage?

[shighfield]

After talking to Nick in private messages he got me interested in this project again.

I've got everything working great on Windows now impserv is sending my books, surfing the internet, and working nice and fast.

My question is, what format are people storing their books in? Since impserv can convert on the fly (Pretty darn cool BTW!) I'm realizing there's no point in storing as IMP anymore.

Most of my books are in Ereader format, but I can convert those to anything, point me in a direction guys.

Just as an aside. The fact that if you specify the main shelf directory and impserve shows ALL books in the various bookshelves (Yet allowing me to organize the way I want)
I'm just leaving it loaded now... it just won.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by shighfield

After talking to Nick in private messages he got me interested in this project again.

I've got everything working great on Windows now impserv is sending my books, surfing the internet, and working nice and fast.

My question is, what format are people storing their books in? Since impserv can convert on the fly (Pretty darn cool BTW!) I'm realizing there's no point in storing as IMP anymore.

Most of my books are in Ereader format, but I can convert those to anything, point me in a direction guys.

Just as an aside. The fact that if you specify the main shelf directory and impserve shows ALL books in the various bookshelves (Yet allowing me to organize the way I want)
I'm just leaving it loaded now... it just won.

I will tell you what I do for storage purposes, in general.

Anything in it's original format that can be converted is saved as well as the resulting .imp (just for convenience).

Never save just the .imp, if it will be likely you may edit the file in the future. Otherwise, I will save the resulting .html and images along with the .imp at a bare minimum.

The impserve plugins download a copy of the .prc/.lit/.pdf before its converted to .imp, but at the end it deletes it. If you want to keep it, just comment out the os.remove(name) line i.e. place a # in front. The .imp gets moved to your local bookshelf for future use!

[shighfield]

Thanks Nick. Having been an ereader junkie since 1999 (When they were peanut press) I have a lot of books in that format.

With your plugin's I'm now able to just keep them in that format and they are converted on the fly to imp's. Very nice!

I'm going to stick with the Ereader format, and just run them through ereader2html then re-create with makedoc to get rid of the DRM nonsense.

[GeneS]

Originally Posted by shighfield

My question is, what format are people storing their books in? Since impserv can convert on the fly (Pretty darn cool BTW!) I'm realizing there's no point in storing as IMP anymore.

First preference is html since I can change that into just about anything I want without a great deal of fuss. Beyond that, I store in whatever format the book was received.

Gene

[shighfield]

I think I'm on the right track then. I just purchased another batch of books from Fictionwise and just keep using Ereader format since I'm used to it. (I do quickly strip the DRM with ereader2html then re-compress back to PDB with Makedoc though.)

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by shighfield

I think I'm on the right track then. I just purchased another batch of books from Fictionwise and just keep using Ereader format since I'm used to it. (I do quickly strip the DRM with ereader2html then re-compress back to PDB with Makedoc though.)

If it increases your available choices to purchase reading material, I say go for it!

Now to automate this process using some (obscure) programming language named after a French mathematician and philosopher...

If only, now, you could get the script to also *find* the money to pay for the ebooks...

[shighfield]

Now to automate this process using some (obscure) programming language named after a French mathematician and philosopher...
If only, now, you could get the script to also *find* the money to pay for the ebooks...

Laugh that's the truth! I've been lucky over the years, that a lot of the books I want to read are free (PG) and because of that and the micropay rebates at fictionwise I figure I'm spending less then I was when I bought dead tree's.

If my wife ever asks... /all/ ebooks are free. <Laugh>

[derrell]

I realize that this thread is a little out of date but as I've been doing some book conversions and I've started thinking, always a dangerous thing .

It might be easiest to keep my books in a zipped file something similar to and oeb container. That is all of the html files, images and the opf zipped to reduce size and stored that way. I used to convert quite a few books this way so that FBReader would read them. Since when you convert a mobi or lit file to imp you start with this structure and with a PG text that is the structure you get just before creatation of the imp file why not just keep it? It's fairly simple to write a utility that can pull the metadata out of the zip file and if you want to go back to another format that is simple too. You could even store the original book file in the archive if you wanted, although that would make the file about twice as big as it would be otherwise.

Any thoughts, or critiques of this method from anyone?

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by derrell

Any thoughts, or critiques of this method from anyone?

OK, you just described storing your files in .epub format or very similar.

Check this tutorial on using WinZip to convert your files to .epub written almost two years ago by the guys at ETI.

I'm surprised that no .epub utilities have been otherwise released by the good folks at ETI; especially given that their President, Garth Conboy, is a leading force in the standards community.

I guess we will have to wait a bit longer for general acceptance and more widespread usage. But, when we are THERE, I most certaininly will update MY tools to support .epub!