Gregg's Nearly Interminable Adventures in Linux Land

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

I did Constellation's last two cruises, transferred off shortly before they decommissioned her.

My error above. I should have said the U.S.S. Constitution, an old square rigger from the age of sail. It's currently home ported in Boston, and the friend in question lives in the Boston 'burbs. (He has substantial tech credits. Among other things, if you use netcat on *nix, it's his code.)

See http://www.ussconstitutionmuseum.org/
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Dennis

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I'd probably use a Nook to check ePubs, since readers here are more likely to have it than a Sony Reader.

Hi Dennis. Thanks for the sideloading info. And what about Kobo? I was researching ereaders and saw Kobo supports epub, pdf and mobi. If I want to see what my books look like in epub and mobi doesn't Kobo then make more sense than Nook?

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You can also view ePub files on Linux using either FBReader or CoolReader

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I've heard good things about FBReader and coolreader, but I've been using Calibre's E-book Viewer and it reads both epub and mobi. Would there be any advantage to switch to FBReader or coolreader?

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

eReader users want online capability. The Amazon Kindle's Whispernet is a feature, because it means they can browse Amazon, select a book, buy it and download it for immediate reading at any hour of the day or night. The Nook has Wifi for similar reasons. What the dedicated reader fans don't want is the distraction of all the other things you can do online, like Facebook or YouTube.

So do all the ereaders nowadays have this wi-fi feature? And really, how is wi-fi different than connecting to the internet?

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The Kindle and Nook are delivered locked down with custom user interfaces optimized for the purpose of buying and reading eBooks. But they can be rooted to unlock them.

I'm a regular guy. I had to google this rooting stuff. This kinda caught my eye:

Therefore, unless you are familiar with the complete rooting process, you should not involve in it or you may also lose the pre-installed configuration of the tablet/mobile.

I bet you those Hannah Montana drives are worth a mint now.

[/QUOTE]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

Gregg, what Dennis said.

I looked specifically for a first generation Nook: eInk, wifi, very little else.

Thanks Dngrsone. So do I have to look for wifi or is it pretty much assumed the ereader will have it?

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

Dennis,

I did Constellation's last two cruises, transferred off shortly before they decommissioned her.

Small world, huh? When you were there, did you run into any Hannah Montana flash drives?

Originally Posted by avantman42

I can confirm that the same is true on Linux. Plug it in, it appears as external storage and files can be copied onto it in the normal way.

I've got a Nook Simple Touch and a Kindle Keyboard. Both work that way with Linux.

Thanks Russ. That's really good to know rather than getting a surprise when I buy the darn thing. Appreciate it.

[Gregg Bell]

Hey, Looking at ebay, a lot of the less expensive ereaders I've seen are all mangled. (One had this totally shattered screen.) Think if I run across something promising I could post the link here and you guys could tell me what you think? (And I really am thinking the Kobo ereader would be better for me because my main objective is to see how the books I'm writing look on an ereader.)

[PeterT]

While Kobo does support Mobi I would caution against relying on it. Remember that the Mobi standard is not open source and that 3rd party implementations of it are based on their understanding of the format, which might not jive with the true standard.

Also the majority of Kobo users never use Mobi support so the chances of bugs are HIGH and the odds of them being fixed is slim to bill.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Hi Dennis. Thanks for the sideloading info. And what about Kobo? I was researching ereaders and saw Kobo supports epub, pdf and mobi. If I want to see what my books look like in epub and mobi doesn't Kobo then make more sense than Nook?

Good question. I don't have a Kobo and haven't used one, so I don't have a good feel for it

The Kobo, like other dedicated readers, will have the code to display eBooks in ROM. The question is what code Kobo uses.

ePub and Mobipocket are both documented formats (though Amazon has made additions to the Mobipocket format that I don't believe are documented.)

Different people have written code to display those formats, based on the specs.

It's one reason I said the display of an ePub file you saw on a Nook vs FBReader or CoolReader wouldn't necessarily be identical. They all use different code. FBReader, for example, says it has limited support for Mobi files. In practice, this means it can't display Mobi files with DRM, because it can't decrypt them. I don't care, as I don't get books with DRM, and it's handled every Mobi file I've tossed at it.

(And if you have the right plugins installed, Calibre can remove DRM for you. They are not shipped with Calibre because simply possessing them is illegal in some places, but they are easy to find and install.)

I've heard good things about FBReader and coolreader, but I've been using Calibre's E-book Viewer and it reads both epub and mobi. Would there be any advantage to switch to FBReader or coolreader?

Not needing to invoke Calibre to to do so?

I make fairly extensive use of Calibre here, but using its built-in viewers is not one of them. I prefer to use FBReader or other app, simply because it's a lot faster to do so, and I don't have the overhead of Calibre while I do it. (And Calibre doesn't exist for Android, so it wouldn't be an option on the tablet.)

The books I'm reading live in more than one place. Calibre creates its own directory structure, and books added to it go in directories under the one it creates, but the ones I read have copies elsewhere as well for convenience. I could read them directly from Calibre's directory, but it's easier not to.

If you have a PC you want to read eBooks on, and you don't have Calibre, what do you use? It will depend on the book's format, but you'll need a third-party app.

So do all the ereaders nowadays have this wi-fi feature?

All? I doubt it. It's mainly useful on a dedicated reader as a way to download books. If you get your books in other ways, and sideload them to your reader, you don't need Wifi.

And really, how is wi-fi different than connecting to the internet?

Wifi is simply a way of connecting. In the old days, you connected via a dial up modem. Time passed, and broadband became more pervasive, so your connectivity is likely provided by a cable modem, DSL line, or satellite dish. Wifi is connection via radio. It's also possible to connect via a cell phone. The way TCP-IP works, you don't care. TCP-IP operates on network packets. The details of precisely how the packets get delivered to the network are handled at a lower level. What the Internet sees in establishing the connection to something else is the packets.

It's like the difference between making a phone call via a land line or a cell phone. Same call, different ways of placing it. (I have VOIP through my cable company, so my phone calls actually get placed through the Internet via TCP-IP, are encoded as TCP-IP packets when I place them, and are decodes into voice on the receiving end.)

I have a cable modem. My cable modem is connected to my wireless router. My desktop, notebook, netbook and tablet connect via ethernet cable to ports on the router. My SO's laptop and Nook tablet connect to the router via wifi. (My notebook and netbook could connect via wifi, but the cable connection is faster - 100mbps vs 54mbps.)

When I travel, the device I travel with connects via Wifi. (Some hotels still have ethernet ports, and I carry cables with me for those cases, but increasingly they assume you will connect with Wifi.)

I'm a regular guy. I had to google this rooting stuff. This kinda caught my eye:

Therefore, unless you are familiar with the complete rooting process, you should not involve in it or you may also lose the pre-installed configuration of the tablet/mobile.

The concept of rooting derives from Unix. On a Unix system, the administrative user is called root, and has full power to do anything system related. When you are running as root, you can shoot yourself in both feet if you aren't properly careful. Unix assumes you know what you are doing.

If you are a normal user, and need root privileges to do something, you use the su command. Su prompts for the root password, and if properly provided, lets you become root for the duration of the session.

Linux systems like Ubuntu create you as a standard user, and won't let you log on directly as root. Instead, your ID is added to a list of users allowed to su. When you do something that requires admin rights, you are prompted for your password, and then allowed to do what you need to do.

Android systems are Linux systems, and if you can get root access, you can do things the particular device won't permit out of the box. The process of doing so is called rooting.

It's a "Not recommended, and you better know what you're doing" operation. I'm a Unix/Linux admin among other things, and do know what I'm doing.

I bet you those Hannah Montana drives are worth a mint now.

Probably along the lines of the Jar-Jar Binks Pez dispenser. A friend bought one, simply to be able to prove down the road that such a thing existed.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by PeterT

While Kobo does support Mobi I would caution against relying on it. Remember that the Mobi standard is not open source and that 3rd party implementations of it are based on their understanding of the format, which might not jive with the true standard.

Mobipocket documented their format back before Amazon acquired them. The MobileRead wiki has a copy of it here: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI

Amazon has made some recent changes to better support stuff possible in ePub, like embedded video that I don't believe are documented. Thus far, I haven't encountered a Mobi file I couldn't read with a third party viewer app.

ePub is documented, but it's an evolving standard, and I don't believe anyone currently supports all of it. The current ePub specs are here: http://idpf.org/epub/30

(The ePub specs specify that a viewer should degrade gracefully, and simply ignore the stuff in an ePub file it can't handle instead of dying horribly.)
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Dennis

[PeterT]

Actually when I read through the Wiki I could find numerous statements on "reverse engineered" and "Unknown usage"; also the entire Wiki entry seems to concentrate on the structure of the binary Mobi file, but very little on the actual contents that the Mobi format delivers.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Actually when I read through the Wiki I could find numerous statements on "reverse engineered" and "Unknown usage"; also the entire Wiki entry seems to concentrate on the structure of the binary Mobi file, but very little on the actual contents that the Mobi format delivers.

What's on the Mobileread wiki is essentially a duplicate of what Mobipocket published.

Mobipocket began on Palm OS devices, and the ebooks in Mobi format show vestiges of the legacy, like a 64K record size limit.

The only things that can be in memory on a Palm device are files in Palm database format, and those will have PDB or PRC extensions. A PDB file is a general Palm database file. It may contain any content. The first record of the database will specify what type of file it is and what Palm application owns it. Programs on Palm devices use the Creator ID in the record to determine which files they can open. PRC files are "resource" databases. Programs on Palm devices have a PRC extension, and the resources are the actual program code, but a PRC file does not have to be a program.

Mobi files for Palm devices have PRC extensions, and the original Mobi Creator app for Windows creates PRC files. There is no difference between a PRC file and a .mobi file, and you can rename it for use on other devices. (The Mobi viewer for Palm will recognize and open .mobi files stored in the /Palm/Launcher directory on an expansion card.)

Mobipocket files are an encapsulated subset of HTML 4, with limited CSS support, compressed with a form of RLE compression compatible with the compression used by Palm "doc" files to save space in memory, and wrapped with metadata describing the file. The support text, text attributes like bold and italic, inline images, fonts (depending upon the device) and hyperlinks.

Back before Amazon bought them, Mobi had the GUI creator app for Windows, and viewers for Palm OS, Windows, Blackberry, Symbian and several other things. They also had a beta command line creator app for Linux.

Amazon has expanded device support to things like Mac OS/X and Android, and the provides the creator app for both Windows and Linux as a command line tool. (It appears to be based on Mobi's early Linux creator app.) Amazon has also replaced the original Mobi viewer app for various devices (save for Palm - development of the Palm OS viewer stopped with release 5.3, though it's still available from the Mobi website.)

Mobi Creator can theoretically take Word docs, Text files, PDFs, and HTML as input. I've had best results starting with HTML, and PDFs are "take your chances". Mobi tries to rip the PDF to HTML, but how well it does varies. Simple one column PDFs with inline image convert reasonable. More complex documents don't.

Amazon has made some updates to the format to better compete with ePub. ePub is a container, and what it contains doesn't have to be just text and images. ePub files can include audio and video, and there have been an assortment of "enhanced" eBooks using those capabilities. I don't believe they've documented them with any sort of formal spec. It seems to be a case of "Create your source file, feed it to Kindlegen, and see where it fails".

Curiously, current Amazon Kindlegen efforts create files that include both ePub and Mobi formats, though the Mobi format is the one read by the Kindle and Kindle viewer apps. It's led to some questions about whether Amazon might switch to ePub at some point.
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Dennis

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by PeterT

While Kobo does support Mobi I would caution against relying on it. Remember that the Mobi standard is not open source and that 3rd party implementations of it are based on their understanding of the format, which might not jive with the true standard.

Also the majority of Kobo users never use Mobi support so the chances of bugs are HIGH and the odds of them being fixed is slim to bill.

Thanks Peter. So if I want a true indication for epub and mobi I should really buy a Nook (or Kobo or whatever handles epub) and a Kindle?

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Good question. I don't have a Kobo and haven't used one, so I don't have a good feel for it

The Kobo, like other dedicated readers, will have the code to display eBooks in ROM. The question is what code Kobo uses.

ePub and Mobipocket are both documented formats (though Amazon has made additions to the Mobipocket format that I don't believe are documented.)

Different people have written code to display those formats, based on the specs.

It's one reason I said the display of an ePub file you saw on a Nook vs FBReader or CoolReader wouldn't necessarily be identical. They all use different code. FBReader, for example, says it has limited support for Mobi files. In practice, this means it can't display Mobi files with DRM, because it can't decrypt them. I don't care, as I don't get books with DRM, and it's handled every Mobi file I've tossed at it.

(And if you have the right plugins installed, Calibre can remove DRM for you. They are not shipped with Calibre because simply possessing them is illegal in some places, but they are easy to find and install.)

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!

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

If you have a PC you want to read eBooks on, and you don't have Calibre, what do you use? It will depend on the book's format, but you'll need a third-party app.

I have this app thing on Mozilla (see screenshot). I honestly don't know the name of it. I'd use that or Sigil. I stay away from Calibre making ebooks because I hear Amazon rejects books made with Calibre. I think the Calibre Ebook reader is quite nice. Btw, on that screenshot, do you have any idea why I'm geting that black line in the address bar?

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.)
Dennis[/QUOTE]

[avantman42]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks Peter. So if I want a true indication for epub and mobi I should really buy a Nook (or Kobo or whatever handles epub) and a Kindle?

For Kindle, why not use the online preview option that you get when uploading to KDP? That has the added bonus that it'll let you see how your book will look on a variety of devices.

[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

[eschwartz]

Specifically, with regard to calibre and uploading to Amazon the problem is using calibre to convert a book to dual mobi -- old mobi works fine, but the presence of new mobi (Kf8) will cause them to reject the book.

Creating an EPUB wih calibre and using kindlegen or directly uploading the EPUB is not a problem according to what I've heard.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by avantman42

For Kindle, why not use the online preview option that you get when uploading to KDP? That has the added bonus that it'll let you see how your book will look on a variety of devices.

Thanks Russ! I have never used that online preview option because I was always using Kindle Previewer. Now that I'm Linux, KP is the one thing, the last thing I couldn't get on Linux. Now with this online option I am WINDOWS-FREE! Hallelujah! LOL Thanks!

[avantman42]

You're very welcome