BIBLE for Sony Reader

[proee]

Thanks everyone. When I get my reader in December (according to my web order, but I'm not holding my breath) I'll be sure to check out all available options. If nothing out there seems to work well, then I'll be taking on the task of creating my own bookmarked version with nice formatting. Best Regards...

[sartori]

I've just been playing around with converting a gutenberg version into pdf.

Take a look (it's only one chapter but should give you an idea).

The first page allows you to select the chapter using the joystick (only one is available so just click the joystick in)

This takes you to a verse selection page - again use the joystick to scroll up and down and click to select.

When viewing the verses you can use the next & prev page buttons or click the joystick which will take you back to the verse index.

Pressing the #1 button will take you back to the chapter index.

This would be a HUGE job to create - but it's one of things that once it's done it won't change.

Converting the gutenberg text into something usable is not too difficult (lots of seach and replace) but adding the links takes forever. It may be better to wait until sony releases the specs for the lrf file and try to create it in that.


Rob

[Nightwing]

WOW.. Darn good job!

[lint]

wow, very nice job. Although im sure SONY or some other company will tackle this at some point, if not (or if we want a translation not available) i know Id be willing to take certain books or chapters to work on. If we had many people just working on certain books it would get done much quicker.

-lint

[hrbrmstr]

Hey folks...

For those of you looking for a daily devotional, are you Windows, OS X, or Linux/BSD?

I've got a script that uses wget/htmldoc to download and generate PDFs from The Upper Room (print devo page: http://www.upperroom.org/Devotional/...ate=10/31/2006, pretty page: http://www.upperroom.org/Devotional/) and Year of The Bible (http://yob.gospelcom.net/reading.php). I've attached samples. I want to add others, but 4 kids (one ~8mos) kinda cramps the development schedule. I also want to add auto-grabbing of the Bible verses in the Upper Room one, but I still keep my 'ol hardcover Bible with me, so it's just laziness @ this point.

I run the script in the morning to generate the current day's files, then copy to SD. (BTW: While the Reader doesn't do hierarchical navigation, I find having directories for "Books", "RSS", and "Devotionals" on the SD card helps *me* keep organized *:^)

I wouldn't mind hosting daily versions of these files for download, but I need to look at bandwidth stats for my own site and talk to both those sites (and any others I might want to use) about the whole HTML->PDF & re-distribution thing.

That's where the platform question comes in. Right now, I run the script on OS X and it pop's-em out all nice & simple. That same script would also work without change (probably, I can test in a VM) on Linux/BSD. I could make an "app" for Windows (very bare or no GUI due to time) to do the same if there's interest. It would probably use the cygwin dll and local (to the app) copies of wget & htmldoc.

Lemme know if anyone's interested and if there are more devotional sites you'd like to see added. I'm going for the simple, daily pages rather than covert entire ones from Gutenberg or www.ccel.org so that I can stay focused on that particular day and not have to worry about bookmarking/etc.

boB

[proee]

Nice work Sartori. I agree with lint - if somebody doesn't come up with their own version soon, then we could distribute the work among multiple members here and have a each person do a few book. What is there like 66 books in the bible. I'll take Obadiah and 3rd John.

Also, if some publisher did decide to format for the reader then they could add a section on each page that would display commentary information on select verses.

[Bob Russell]

Originally Posted by hrbrmstr

Lemme know if anyone's interested and if there are more devotional sites you'd like to see added. I'm going for the simple, daily pages rather than covert entire ones from Gutenberg or www.ccel.org so that I can stay focused on that particular day and not have to worry about bookmarking/etc.

Wow, this is incredible! I only looked at it on my desktop, but will load it on my Reader and take a look when I get a few minutes. I'm also going to hunt for some sites with a daily bit from Spurgeons Morning/Eve and Oswald Chambers and Upper Room devotionals, as well as an NIV or NKJV daily reading. I'm sure I can find most of those on the web, and it would be spectacular to have them on the Reader! Great work!

[lint]

ive been converting a lot of spurgeon from spurgeon.org over to my reader. fantastic stuff!

-lint

[Bob Russell]

I took a look on the Reader, and the print is very small. Is it possible to bump up the size significantly? Or do others like the tiny text?

[NatCh]

I'm home with a cold today, so I finished up my processing of the World English Bible version.

From their site:

The World English Bible (WEB) is a Public Domain (no copyright) Modern English translation of the Holy Bible, based on the American Standard Version of the Holy Bible first published in 1901, the Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensa Old Testament, and the Greek Majority Text New Testament.

Basically they took the ASV and modernized its language (no thee's & thou's, etc.) It's a reasonably good version, though not a direct translation.

What I did, was run each book through WordPad (which stripped the double columns, and dropped the file size considerably), changed the font to Arial (my personal preference -- sorry you Serif Font lovers out there, but my ergonomics class prof told us that sans-serif fonts are the easiest to read ), and bumped the size to 18 points. Then I used NotePad to manually add some metadata back in.

The results display agreeably enough for straight reading, but navigation is rather a pain in the sitter-downer (as expected). They're in file alpha order, and there is a sub dir with 'extra' books, some apocryphal, some just alternate translations, and I seem to remember a note from the translators ....

Anyway, I haven't processed the extras, but I include them out of respect for the folks who did the real work of making the text available in the first place.

[hrbrmstr]

devos:

I'm hoping to make the script/scriptlet/app customizable. Later versions have the text @ 14pt (pretty readable). I'll post more after my (or during) vacation (wi-fi @ the campground - yay!).

Bibles:

w/r/t Bibles on the Reader...ccel.org has many of them in Theological Markup Language, an XML syntax specific to coding texts with scripture references or Bibles. You need to register to d/l, but they have many Bibles that are ready for processing from XML to whatever works best for the Reader.

[Bob Russell]

Okay, here is my wishlist for the Bible and devotionals on the Reader:

* One Minute Bible, Ed. Kohlenberger (I've seen KJV, but NIV would be better)
This is key excerpts in daily readings. "The heart of the Bible
presented in 366 one minute readings."
* One Year Bible (Full NIV in daily readings, by Tyndale)
* One Year Bible Companion

* Morning and Evening: Spurgeon
* My Utmost for His Highest: Oswald Chambers
* Upper Room (as given in previous post)

I like 18-20pt on the Reader, but I can understand other people wanting smaller, and 16 small can be increased just fine with M/L sizes.

The first three are books that I suppose would just have to be added to the store by Sony. I suppose a PD Bible could be converted into a daily reading Bible using any Bible in a year reading plan. (Personally, I like the ones with OT/NT/Prov/Psalms each day for variety.) The devotionals seem to be achievable with some work, and would be really great to have on the Reader. Currently, I have the equivalent of the one-year Bible, and two of the devotionals on my Treo, which works well also, and has the added advantage of being with me at all times. But a Sony Reader version would be so nice aesthetically and easy on the eyes!

I haven't looked in detail at what has been done so far in this thread, but when I have time, I'll look at it and see if I can apply to the devotionals. Or maybe another of the tools that have been modified/created so far for the Reader.

[frquixote]

I already have Spurgeon's Morning and Evening in Microsoft Word (one page per morning and one page per evening). I converted it to provide a clean text for eBook Studio. As I understand it, it would be a very simple matter to re-scale the text sizes and convert it to RTF. I also have Daily Strength for Daily Needs by Mary Wilder Tileston in the same format converted from Gutenberg plain text. Don't have the Word documents with me, but will post them when I get home this evening.

[lint]

thanks frquixote, i look forward to those.

-lint

[sic]

copyright on the Bible always makes me laugh...
who owns the copyright? Moses?