Linux compatibility question and online ebook stores?

[rdjack21]

Yea I had the VBox with XP on it for a while but when I got my new laptop I tried wine instead and for now it is working. About the only thing I use ADE for is getting books from the library.

I guess if Adobe forces the new version on us then I will have to set up VBox on my laptop for those library books.

[DiapDealer]

Hopefully winetricks comes up with a more solid solution for the newer .NET Frameworks before ADE 1.8 is forced upon us. Things go downhill quickly from .NET 3.0 onward, but support for .NET 2.0 is pretty solid... so I do hold out some slight hope.

Did Adobe quickly cancel support for the previous version of ADE when 1.7 came out? Or does the previous version still work?

[Hellmark]

Yeah, they pushed people over to 1.7 when it came out. Mandatory upgrade.

That said, I'm a linux user, and current version of ADE runs under wine great. I use Calibre for my ebook management when I have the books downloaded. If it is legal in your area, and/or you're not morally against it, DRM stripping books you've bought and downloaded is also an option (A shame you have that evil twin, Diapdealer). My standard method is, buy, download, strip DRM, put in Calibre, transfer to my Sony. I get to use my books under linux, so I am happy, and the publishers should be happy because I'm not pirating and they get paid.

[DiapDealer]

Yeah, I don't use ADE or epub very often, but I know I had no problems getting 1.7 to work fine (including all the extra functionality) under WINE.

Hopefully something changes before the mandatory 1.8 upgrade. I imagine somebody will work something out in the nick of time.

[Hellmark]

Well, virtual machines are an option if it comes to that. What I am curious about, is how well ReactOS handles .Net. I know that it is WINE based, but at the same time, it does some things differently. Guess something to try sometime.

[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

[DiapDealer]

Calibre is a nice tool, actually rephrazing, it's a great tool although would have like to see a CLI option too for it.

Calibre has a full command-line interface. You can script pretty much anything calibre's capable of doing. You only have to use the GUI if you want to.