Register Guidelines E-Books Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Go Back   MobileRead Forums > E-Book Formats > Other formats

Notices

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Old 03-31-2015, 01:29 AM   #16
cyanic
File format tinkerer
cyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of it
 
Posts: 19
Karma: 66468
Join Date: Oct 2014
Device: PC
And here's something exciting. See if you can figure it out.



Hint

Last edited by cyanic; 06-25-2015 at 02:03 PM. Reason: Wow, look at that new screenshot
cyanic is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 03-31-2015, 02:16 AM   #17
eschwartz
Ex-Helpdesk Junkie
eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.eschwartz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
eschwartz's Avatar
 
Posts: 19,422
Karma: 85397180
Join Date: Nov 2012
Location: The Beaten Path, USA, Roundworld, This Side of Infinity
Device: Kindle Touch fw5.3.7 (Wifi only)
Something cool for you to blog about elsewhere and possibly link to?
eschwartz is offline   Reply With Quote
Advert
Old 04-03-2015, 11:29 PM   #18
cyanic
File format tinkerer
cyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of it
 
Posts: 19
Karma: 66468
Join Date: Oct 2014
Device: PC
Three sides of the same coin:






Last edited by cyanic; 06-25-2015 at 10:12 PM.
cyanic is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-05-2015, 11:34 AM   #19
cyanic
File format tinkerer
cyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of it
 
Posts: 19
Karma: 66468
Join Date: Oct 2014
Device: PC
Interesting tidbit: why is there a key on the VitalBook icon? It turns out that before Bookshelf 3.7 the program was called "vitalsource KEY", hence the key in the icon. VitalSource used to sell DVDs with entire curriculums for distribution in universities, and they also preloaded what was called the "Portable Personal Library" on IBM computers. vitalsource KEY was what you used to view those books. Even farther back the program was called VitalViewer. What has stuck through all these years, however, is the name VitalBook. Heck, even the format's more or less the same (at least starting version 3; I couldn't find any earlier version for download).


Looking at the titles in the PPL, I can see why they don't offer it anymore. It's basically all public domain content. It's easy enough to get any of that off the Internet; who wants to pay for it?

Here is a snapshot of what VST was doing at the beginning of the 21st century.

Bonus: apparently VitalSource had a few TV spots. They are sort of weird. https://www.youtube.com/user/wdmvst/videos

Last edited by cyanic; 06-25-2015 at 10:12 PM. Reason: Laugh at them ads.
cyanic is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-08-2015, 03:18 AM   #20
gonzule
before sleep, read or TV?
gonzule began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 97
Karma: 10
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Australia
Device: Kobo Libra 2
Thanks cyanic, ill give your extractor a try
gonzule is offline   Reply With Quote
Advert
Old 04-15-2015, 11:24 AM   #21
cyanic
File format tinkerer
cyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of it
 
Posts: 19
Karma: 66468
Join Date: Oct 2014
Device: PC
Looks like VitalSource added some new features to their Page Fidelity format. They've added document structure metadata for each page, and now each glyph entry also have its corresponding character as an attribute. The structure metadata was probably designed for accessibility, in particular image alt-texts. The new glyph entries would make it slightly easier to convert PictureBooks to PDF, considering the corresponding text file won't need to be read.

Now, on to VitalSource's own documents. Wow, they are horrible in quality. The EPUB guide throws a whole bunch of errors in EPUBCheck. In fact, it's really just a Word document exported to HTML and converted/split with Calibre. The PDF guide is a complete mess, with every item in the TOC going to the wrong page and the highlighting being ludicrous, only highlighting around half of each letter. Some pages you can select the footer text, some pages you can't. If VitalSource can't even get their own documents working properly in their system, what business do they have ingesting others' contents?
cyanic is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-18-2015, 08:06 AM   #22
gonzule
before sleep, read or TV?
gonzule began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 97
Karma: 10
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Australia
Device: Kobo Libra 2
there is a really big mess with vitalsource bookshelf. I finally was able to convert my book to epub, but it is way too big and my epaper/eink reader gets stuck while loading it, and some software even give me lots of erros.

Now, i converted it to HTML and i am editing and removing some unwanted things (i.e. page numbers) so that i can later convert it to PDF.
gonzule is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-06-2015, 12:32 PM   #23
cyanic
File format tinkerer
cyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of it
 
Posts: 19
Karma: 66468
Join Date: Oct 2014
Device: PC
It's interesting how many books on VitalSource don't seem to pass EPUBCheck. Apparently VitalSource doesn't do any cleanup on the books, and publishers try their best to make proper EPUBs while still remaining sort of clueless. Fun fact: Extractor.epub, despite all its JavaScript, passes EPUBCheck tests.
cyanic is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-20-2015, 02:05 AM   #24
asdfzxh
Junior Member
asdfzxh began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 1
Karma: 10
Join Date: May 2015
Device: ipad
wrg...
asdfzxh is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-28-2015, 06:47 PM   #25
daphnis
Junior Member
daphnis began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 1
Karma: 12
Join Date: Jul 2015
Device: none
I have created a macro on the Mac that will convert VBK to PDF. It uses the program Keyboard Maestro and was developed with version 7. VitalSource Bookshelf version 6.6 was also used to develop the workflow. All this was done on 10.10.4 (Yosemite).

The workflow will loop through a printing cycle and print the maximum number of pages that are allowed by that publication. There are several things that need to be specified manually, and those are in the color red. Those in orange may or may not need to be changed; it's up to you to test and find out.

The main thing to customize in addition to the steps in red or orange is the number of repeat cycles to run. The "Repeat Actions" step loops through the actions to print in blocks of X number. Determine how many times to repeat by <Total number of pages that are specified with integers> divided by <Max Number of pages to print in each run>. For example, if there are 180 pages that are numbered (doesn’t include pages that are numbered with Roman numerals), and you can print a maximum of 10 pages at a time, then set the Repeat action to 18 times. Note that if the number of pages isn’t even divisible, then repeat to the highest possible number, then you’ll have to manually print the excess both after this number, and before if the book uses Roman numerals.

I have used this to convert about 2,000 pages into PDFs, and I hope it helps someone else in the future.
Attached Files
File Type: zip VBK to PDF printing macro.kmmacros.zip (2.0 KB, 1996 views)
daphnis is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-11-2016, 07:25 AM   #26
youaredasabi
Junior Member
youaredasabi began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 1
Karma: 10
Join Date: Jan 2016
Device: Vital
Exclamation

Quote:
Originally Posted by cyanic View Post
It's interesting how many books on VitalSource don't seem to pass EPUBCheck. Apparently VitalSource doesn't do any cleanup on the books, and publishers try their best to make proper EPUBs while still remaining sort of clueless. Fun fact: Extractor.epub, despite all its JavaScript, passes EPUBCheck tests.

Your dll file doesn't work for any version of Vitalsource.
Extractor.epub also do nothing when click Extract Epub button.
Anyone successfully?
youaredasabi is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-18-2016, 04:10 PM   #27
DRMlockedStudent
Junior Member
DRMlockedStudent began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 2
Karma: 10
Join Date: Jun 2013
Device: iPad 2
The extractor.epub works fine on older versions of vital source. My problem is most of my books are in other formats (pdfbook or picture book) and are incompatible with the epub. No idea yet how to convert properly to a pdf without taking screenshots.
DRMlockedStudent is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-20-2016, 08:45 PM   #28
cyanic
File format tinkerer
cyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of itcyanic has read War And Peace ... all of it
 
Posts: 19
Karma: 66468
Join Date: Oct 2014
Device: PC
Alright, so I finally got a chance to look at VitalSource stuff again, since I needed some books this semester. All I'll say is they've changed some things, and while it's a nuisance, nothing too difficult.

I'm not going to be updating or releasing any tools for Bookshelf, since I don't want to make it harder for others who may be working on the format, with VitalSource patching holes. I will also not be providing support for the existing tools over the forums aside from "read the instructions", because you know the rules. The tools are quite easy and straightforward to use, as long as you can follow the instructions and have vulnerable versions of Bookshelf. However, do expect that VitalSource will be overhauling everything to make them obsolete. They've been doing a lot recently, completing their merger with CourseSmart and bringing a much nicer looking online reading interface, along with cracking down on insecurities in their programs that they somehow didn't anticipate would cause problems before I came along. I wouldn't be surprised if they completely discontinue the older VBK versions once Vista support comes to an end and they can drop support for the old version of Bookshelf (if they're desperate, they might even go back and update that version). Don't forget, they've been preparing for the updated version of the format with "enhanced security" for a number of months now.
cyanic is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 03-20-2016, 04:36 AM   #29
MrNoComment
Junior Member
MrNoComment began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 1
Karma: 10
Join Date: Mar 2016
Device: Laptop
How it know if Extractor will work ?

Thank so much cyanic for your great efforts!
I've been trying with Extractor.epub for some good time now, but still couldn't get it to work.
I'm trying it with a vbk file on the following setup:
VitalSource Bookshelf 6.2.3 (31) on Windows 10 x64

Should I expect it to work or stop trying ?
Thanks
MrNoComment is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 04-03-2016, 11:05 PM   #30
koollegend1
Junior Member
koollegend1 began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 3
Karma: 10
Join Date: Apr 2016
Device: Ipad
I am currently also trying with windows 10, bookshelf 6.2 (24), and extractor.epub . However it seem to show error and does not extract. Would you be able to help me?

http://prntscr.com/anusdu

Thanks

Last edited by koollegend1; 04-03-2016 at 11:30 PM.
koollegend1 is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search

Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
VBK converstion TO other format NetVicious Workshop 6 01-27-2012 03:22 AM
from vbk to azw? barclay76 General Discussions 0 01-02-2012 03:18 PM
Vitalbook and jetBook Lite DJHARKAVY Workshop 0 12-27-2009 10:40 AM
.VBK to any other format alkeshtech Other formats 0 03-13-2009 10:29 AM
.vbk conversion? baobab77 Workshop 4 01-07-2009 01:05 AM


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 08:14 AM.


MobileRead.com is a privately owned, operated and funded community.