[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks for all the great explanations, Dennis. I think I'll be staying away from Kobo for mobi. I think I'm going to need an epub ereader and a mobi ereader. On the DRM front I've got this book with DRM that I simply can't read on Linux. I tried the Adobe DRM thing. That was a joke. How do people read DRM books on Linux? Is there a way of doing it legally? One thing I did learn from my experience trying to read the DRM book was I'm never making any of my books DRM!

Offhand, I'd say people read DRMed eBooks on Linux by stripping the DRM. As mentioned, Calibre can do that for you with the right plugins installed.

Bravo on your stance on DRM. Those who apply DRM to prevent piracy are making the same error the MPAA/RIAA made pushing the whole SOPA/PIPA thing a while back. They were assuming that if they could just magically stop piracy, revenues would soar, because people would buy instead.

Not true. People pay for stuff because it has value to them. The stuff people pirate has little or no value they would pay for. It's worth getting free. If they had to pay they'd do without. There are people who will pay, and the authors are far better served spending the time and effort on letting them know they and their work exists, providing value, and making it as easy as possible for people to give them money.

I have this app thing on Mozilla (see screenshot). I honestly don't know the name of it.

You can determine that from the Addons listing. I suspect it's EPUBReader

In Firefox, there are a couple of addons for reading ePub (and one for FB2)in the browser. One is EPUBReader. The other is Lucifox. I chose Lucifox because EPUBReader insists in adding ePubs you read in it to a catalog, and keeps the catalog in the Firefox profile directory with no option to put it elsewhere. Lucifox can have a catalog, but does not require one.

I'd use that or Sigil.

I have Sigil here, and recommend it. Development has largely stopped, but what is there works. The Sigil foilks are pointing at Calibre now because Kovid is adding eBook editing features comparable to what Sigil does.

I stay away from Calibre making ebooks because I hear Amazon rejects books made with Calibre.

That's been discussed elsewhere, and isn't true. People have successfully created Mobi files in Calibre and uploaded to Amazon. Probably safest to use the Kindlegen app, but you can use Calibre.

I think the Calibre Ebook reader is quite nice.

If you happen to be in Calibre anyway, yes. If you just want to read a book, invoking Calibre to do so is more time and overhead than I care for.

Btw, on that screenshot, do you have any idea why I'm geting that black line in the address bar?

None whatever.

Thanks for the great explanation of wi-fi. I imagine I'd be sideloading all my books so wifi is not goig to be a must-have feature for me. And thanks for the root explanation. I've done that a couple of times in the command line (sudo...) and I think I've been lucky I didn't wreck things entirely. (When you start out in Linux all these forums are giving you all these commands to do stuff and I would say 80% of them involve going root.)

Ubuntu also has gksudo, which does similar things from the GUI. If you try to do something that requires admin rights, it pops up the box asking for your password and gives you the required elevated permissions for the operation.

There's a flavor of Linux called Puppy Linux where you always run as root. Indeed, the ability to create and use non-root IDs has been removed.

It gets away with it because Puppy is explicitly a single-user system, intended for lower end hardware, and if you break something, you only shoot yourself in the foot. (And Puppy's design makes it relatively easy to recover if you do shoot yourself in the foot.) Having been an admin an machines that migh have a hundred or more users logged on and active at a time, the idea of always running as root gives me hives. I changed Ubuntu here to allow me to log on as root, but seldom do so. Easy enough to sudo when I need to, and I prefer to run as a normal user otherwise.
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Dennis