[ePingus]

Just quickly coming back to this post; I've bought the Aluratek Libre Pro and Sony PRS350 in the mean time and had some time to play around with them.

I'm not going to go through hardware things here as that's over in my other post but the interface between Linux/UNIX and the eReader.


So far I mainly use PDF and ePub formats on these readers.


Calibre is a nice tool, actually rephrazing, it's a great tool although would have like to see a CLI option too for it. The GUI is a bit confusing for someone like me that rarely uses the GUI - only for web browsing, emails, and multimedia. The issue that I have with Calibre is that it does weird things to my filing system.

I catagorize books in one folder then want to sync that to my eREADER folder but only in ePub format. Calibre seems to save the converted files under author/title or some other form which I haven't worked out yet and especially when doing bulk converts is quite tedious as I'm now having to go through ~1000 titles to re-sort everything according to my original filing method.

Calibre also doesn't have any option to view specific file formats within the GUI which I find not so helpful as say out of a bulk-convert of 500+ titles a few of them, ~100 couldn't be converted to ePub format. There's no way of knowing which one's these are without manually going through each title and checking if the little **epub** shows up on the right hand pane of the software.

In addition to Calibre I've found that E-Book viewer is a very useful tool for previewing edited epub's. Or Evince for that matter as PDF reader to compare and contrast the 'big screen' layout on the notebook with the eReader.

I also like Sigil, PDFedit and YAGF.


All in all I can be quite productive using the tools mentioned above and then transfer the books to the readers via a shell script:

#!/bin/bash
while :
do
	clear
	echo 'SCRIPT TO RECURSIVELY TRANSFER FILES FROM FOLDERS FOR ALURATEK LIBRE PRO  eREADER'
	echo '---------------------------------------------------------------------------------'
	echo ''
	echo 'PRESS CRTL-C TO BREAK OUT!'
	echo ''
	echo 'On dir input exclude /zr/eBook_Reader/Libre/Books/'
	echo ''
	echo 'Please input requested dir:'
	echo ''
	read INPUT 
	echo ''
	rsync -avr --inplace --progress --delete --force /zr/eBook_Reader/Libre/Books/$INPUT /media/3837-3265/Books/
done

Or the script for the Sony:

#!/bin/bash
while :
do
	clear
	echo 'SCRIPT TO RECURSIVELY TRANSFER FILES FROM FOLDERS FOR SONY PRS350 eREADER'
	echo '-------------------------------------------------------------------------'
	echo ''
	echo 'PRESS CRTL-C TO BREAK OUT!'
	echo ''
	echo 'On dir input exclude /zr/eBook_Reader/PRS350/'
	echo ''
	echo 'Please input requested dir:'
	echo ''
	read INPUT 
	echo ''
	rsync -avr --inplace --progress --exclude=database --exclude=How*to*get*eBooks*on*Reader.pdf --exclude=User*Guide.pdf --exclude=*.calibre --exclude=Backup --exclude=transfer.sh --exclude=PRS350.pdf --delete /zr/eBook_Reader/PRS350/$INPUT /media/READER/
done

which works directly from my remote filesystem, as all my information is stored on the network and not locally.


Hope this helps someone out! - all I can say is that it's a lot of fun