A Vision for eBook Viewer's Future [idea]

[Oldeyes]

I have been using ebook readers for a while now and am seeing some amount of cumbersomeness when compared to physical books. I am trying to describe a vision for how an ebook viewer might work differently to improve their flexibility.

As everyone has certainly experienced with physical paper books, you can easily flip back and forth between pages and chapters. And with a shelf of related books, can swap between books and page markers quite easily, even comparing pages of two or more books at once. This is not quite as easy with viewers as they generally show one page at a time.

What I'm thinking of is similar to horizontal scrolling on some shopping sites; scroll left-back pages, right-forward pages. And chapters, scroll up/down. Use hot corners: top-left for Contents, top-right for Index (or reverse for right-to-left readers). I'd like to use bottom-left and bottom-right hot corners for user-selected alternate functions, such as last book viewed or next next book on shelf or set, and page split (2 books at once) functions.

Kind of related to this, I wish for the ability in Calibre's main application to select several books in a sequence and convert the set into new single book of specified type (in order selected, potentially each with their own ToC) thus making a bookshelf a single file or instance and making books more multi-dimensional, for example creating an author or subject anthology.

Thanks for listening and thanks for Calibre!

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Oldeyes

Kind of related to this, I wish for the ability in Calibre's main application to select several books in a sequence and convert the set into new single book of specified type (in order selected, potentially each with their own ToC) thus making a bookshelf a single file or instance and making books more multi-dimensional, for example creating an author or subject anthology.

No opinion on your first suggestion since I do my reading on an eInk reader.

On your second if you have your ebooks in epub format, you might want to check out the EpubMerge plugin. Personally I find myself more often splitting box sets back into the individual books using the EpubSplit plugin.

[kovidgoyal]

There is no such thing as pages in ebooks, as for flipping between chapters, you can do that already in calibre, by swiping up/down or using the keybard shortcuts for it (Ctrl+Pageup/Pagedown)

And you can view the contents of the book by right clicking and chooising Table of Contents, or pressing ctrl+t. And you can use extremely powerful search and highlighting/bookmark features, which once you learn to leverage them leave scanning through paperbooks in the dust.

[nqk]

I totally am reading on Content Server, it's great on my Onyx Book Poke 3... in terms of reading. For browsing, there are still issues for eink devices, just because the swiping experience on eink devices is not great. For this I hope there's a page-like UI for the library.

For the maybe long-term future, it would be great to have
1) per-user book rating --> all user book ratings
2) per user reading history. Say now you're are reading on your mobile phone then you want to resume on your eink, the "history" would help to quickly select the book.