ereader2ereader in two steps

[=X=]

Required:
Dropbook/MakeBook (tools to make eReader books)
ereader2html.py

One time setup:
Install DropBook or MakeBook (obsolete java command line tool)
http://www.ereader.com/ereader/help/...k/download.htm


Make changes to erader2html:

Note as of 0.06+ (aka v6) ereader2html now includes this change, so this step is not needed with the newer script

(note line number are before ANY insert)
Insert after line 470 keep the same indent as line 470
os.makedirs(outdir + '\\book_img')

Insert after line 476 keep the same indent as line 476
file(os.path.join(outdir + '\\book_img', name), 'wb').write(contents)

Insert after line 479 keep the same indent as line 479
file(os.path.join(outdir, 'book.pml'),'wb').write(er.getText())


Now for the process:
Step 1: Run the ereader2html tool.
Step 2: Open DropBook. And drag and drop the book.pml file on the drop book application.
(this step will produce a file book.pdb in the same directory)
=X=

[wallcraft]

This seems to be an update to version 0.03. I guess it could be renamed ereader2pml, although it is writing both html and pml.

Is there any reading software for eReader ebooks that only accepts DRM-free ebooks? Even if not, this allows changes to be made to the PML, e.g. to fix errors.

[=X=]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

This seems to be an update to version 0.03. I guess it could be renamed ereader2pml, although it is writing both html and pml.

Yes I guess I wouldn't call it an update a real update would add a command line option to control the output. I just wanted to keep the changes small

I suppose a better approach would be to remove the lines that produce the html and rename it ereader2pml.

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Is there any reading software for eReader ebooks that only accepts DRM-free ebooks? Even if not, this allows changes to be made to the PML, e.g. to fix errors.

Yes most of the eReader clients created by Fictionwise/eReader.com support un-infected eReader eBooks. I've downloaded some multi-format eReader files and was able to read them on my BlackBerry.

=X=

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by =X=

Required:
Dropbook/MakeBook (tools to make eReader books)
ereader2html.pl

One time setup:
Install DropBook or MakeBook (obsolete java command line tool)
http://www.ereader.com/ereader/help/...k/download.htm


Make changes to erader2html:
(note line number are before ANY insert)
Insert after line 470 keep the same indent as line 470
os.makedirs(outdir + '\\book_img')

Insert after line 476 keep the same indent as line 476
file(os.path.join(outdir + '\\book_img', name), 'wb').write(contents)

Insert after line 479 keep the same indent as line 479
file(os.path.join(outdir, 'book.pml'),'wb').write(er.getText())


Now for the process:
Step 1: Run the ereader2html tool.
Step 2: Open DropBook. And drag and drop the book.pml file on the drop book application.
(this step will produce a file book.pdb in the same directory)
=X=

Strangest thing. I inserted the lines - as written - in the appropriate places, and, of course, Under Python 2.6 it don't work. Now eReader2HTML.py works fine, but the new version, which I renamed eReader2pml.py, seems to think all three lines are bad/wrong/flawed. What gives?

Derek

[=X=]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Strangest thing. I inserted the lines - as written - in the appropriate places, and, of course, Under Python 2.6 it don't work. Now eReader2HTML.py works fine, but the new version, which I renamed eReader2pml.py, seems to think all three lines are bad/wrong/flawed. What gives?

Derek

What error are you getting?

Make sure you indent with a TAB and not with spaces, or else the script will not work.


=X=

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by =X=

What error are you getting?

Make sure you indent with a TAB and not with spaces, or else the script will not work.


=X=

Ack! Pthht! Pthht! Ptui! Bad Python! Bad! Bad! (Ye GHODS! It's *that* sensitive to the difference between spaces and tabs???)

Derek

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by =X=

What error are you getting?

Make sure you indent with a TAB and not with spaces, or else the script will not work.


=X=

Oh! My! Glorg! It *IS* that sensitive to spaces vs. tabs!!! It's working fine now.

Derek

[JSWolf]

Any chance eReader2HTML.py can be modified so it will go eReader to HTML without having to have a DRM infected eReader file?

[=X=]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Oh! My! Glorg! It *IS* that sensitive to spaces vs. tabs!!! It's working fine now.

Derek

And that is the that is the reason why I've chosen not to learn Python.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Any chance eReader2HTML.py can be modified so it will go eReader to HTML without having to have a DRM infected eReader file?

Hi Jon, have you tried Nick's script built around ETools?

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...2&postcount=40

It actually does a better job converting eReader to HTML than the ereader2html.py script.

=X=

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by =X=

And that is the that is the reason why I've chosen not to learn Python.



Hi Jon, have you tried Nick's script built around ETools?

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...2&postcount=40

It actually does a better job converting eReader to HTML than the ereader2html.py script.

=X=

Perl, Yet Another Reason To Practice Retroactive Abortion!

Why, oh why, cannot people write these in C++, Java or Pascal (Delphi/FPC/Kylix)???

Derek

[AZed]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Perl, Yet Another Reason To Practice Retroactive Abortion!

Why, oh why, cannot people write these in C++, Java or Pascal (Delphi/FPC/Kylix)???

Because it's a lot faster to develop in Perl, it's portable (EBook::Tools runs successfully under Windows, MacOSX, and many flavours of Unix), and if you have good habits the resulting code is substantially more readable and easier to build on. (Mind you, if you *don't* have good habits, Perl will cheerfully load the fully automatic shotgun and pre-aim it at your foot, but that's another story entirely.)

I programmed for many years in C++. I pray I never have to again. (C or C#, maybe.) In any case, library support is poor and nonportable for it. Pascal is an even worse choice. Java would have at least been portable, but I've always found the integration of Java with the unix environment to be hideously clunky, and again, the free software library availability is close to nonexistent. When Java gets the equivalent of CPAN or even PyPI, I'll re-evaluate it.

What problem exactly are you having with Perl?

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by AZed

Because it's a lot faster to develop in Perl, it's portable (EBook::Tools runs successfully under Windows, MacOSX, and many flavours of Unix), and if you have good habits the resulting code is substantially more readable and easier to build on. (Mind you, if you *don't* have good habits, Perl will cheerfully load the fully automatic shotgun and pre-aim it at your foot, but that's another story entirely.)

I programmed for many years in C++. I pray I never have to again. (C or C#, maybe.) In any case, library support is poor and nonportable for it. Pascal is an even worse choice. Java would have at least been portable, but I've always found the integration of Java with the unix environment to be hideously clunky, and again, the free software library availability is close to nonexistent. When Java gets the equivalent of CPAN or even PyPI, I'll re-evaluate it.

What problem exactly are you having with Perl?

Perl is almost as bad as FORTH for write-once, read-never. Python is nearly as bad. Portable??? Lesseenow. C/C++ can be written on Linux, Mac and PC systems. Pascal nearly so. Java as well. And ALL of those can be made robust and into clear, simple, GUI .EXEs... But Perl??? One might as well write it in VBScript. PFAUH!

[bwaldron]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Perl is almost as bad as FORTH for write-once, read-never. Python is nearly as bad.

Can't agree at all WRT Python. Yes, it has issues with whitespace that some people freak out over, but the language makes it easy to produce clean, modular and very readable code.

[AZed]

Originally Posted by bwaldron

Can't agree at all WRT Python. Yes, it has issues with whitespace that some people freak out over, but the language makes it easy to produce clean, modular and very readable code.

I can't agree at all with respect to Perl, either. Perl makes it easy to write unreadable code -- but it also makes it fairly easy to write clean code, with very nice unit testing components, including one that checks for the presence of documentation, and another that actually checks code style against best practices. I wouldn't suggest it as a language to a novice coder, but for a third or fourth language, it's a language you can actually get things done in without too much fighting, with passable performance and rapid test/fix cycles. And you can write awful and unreadable code in any language.

As for the portability of C/C++, I have to guess that either you haven't tried to write much cross-platform code yourself, or that you seem to be under the impression that it's a good idea to rewrite everything in the world except the standard libraries from scratch, because other than those standard libraries, the code is *not* trivially portable, particularly where a GUI is involved, and in fact there's a whole cottage industry (the autotools/libtool chain) built around trying to bang it into something that will plausibly compile and run even inside a Unix environment, much less between Unix/Windows/MacOS. You can't just grab KDE, stick it on a Windows box, and run 'nmake' (or at least, if you can, there's an entire project dedicated to attempting to port it that could use your help). Unless I go out of my way to use non-portable W32-only components in Perl, I can be reasonably confident that my code will not require substantial porting effort to be usable anywhere Perl runs. I can't say this about C, C++, or Pascal. C++ is particularly bad: you can't even guarantee that code written in C++ will continue to link with libraries of the same version on the same operating system after a compiler upgrade, because the ABI has changed twice in the last half decade alone!

Java would be portable, but I find even well-written Java code difficult to read due to sheer verbosity, and again, there is no other language with as large a portable library collection as Perl. Python is only now catching up on the basics, Ruby is a long way off, and nobody else even seems to be trying.

When I wrote EBook::Tools, I didn't have to write a ZIP format parser/extracter, a bit vector routine, an INI file parser, a UUID generator, a complex date manipulator, a mime-type detector, an HTML tree parser, an HTML text wrapper, an image parser, a PalmDB parser/writer, or an XML tree builder that allowed for custom search methods, or a GUI builder. I didn't have to come up with a mechanism by which my library could be easily embedded into a CGI script on a webserver.

But quite seriously, if you can point me to a reliable method by which I can find portable versions of all of those components in C# (and by portable, I mean "an executable using them can be trivially cross-compiled or at least trivially recompiled and installed by the end-user with free software for any given Unix, MS Windows, and MacOSX"), I'll be happy to give it a close look. I understand that the Mono project has made great strides in recent years, so this might even be possible. I might even get over my distaste for all things Java if you can demonstrate that they do, in fact, have a decent library repository hidden away somewhere. I'll contemplate other languages, if you can demonstrate that they've got the properties I need.

I'm a firm believer in using the right tool for any given project. In this case, I happen to believe that the right tool was Perl.

Lecture aside, however, you didn't answer my question: what is it that you want to do with my library or the associated command-line tool that isn't working for you? Is it just that it isn't GUI-driven? I'm actually working on a GUI tool, but it's going very slowly as I started a new job and haven't had much time for hacking lately.

[thianliongpatpoh]

Originally Posted by =X=

Required:
Dropbook/MakeBook (tools to make eReader books)
ereader2html.py

One time setup:
Install DropBook or MakeBook (obsolete java command line tool)
http://www.ereader.com/ereader/help/...k/download.htm


Make changes to erader2html:
(note line number are before ANY insert)
Insert after line 470 keep the same indent as line 470
os.makedirs(outdir + '\\book_img')

Insert after line 476 keep the same indent as line 476
file(os.path.join(outdir + '\\book_img', name), 'wb').write(contents)

Insert after line 479 keep the same indent as line 479
file(os.path.join(outdir, 'book.pml'),'wb').write(er.getText())


Now for the process:
Step 1: Run the ereader2html tool.
Step 2: Open DropBook. And drag and drop the book.pml file on the drop book application.
(this step will produce a file book.pdb in the same directory)
=X=

THANK YOU!
I've been trying to find a way to do an ereader2pdb (just strip the drm), and your additional coding to the current ereader2html.py does the jobe nicely. I've compared the original purchased-drm-laden pdb with the resulting pdb created by this ereader2ereader (or ereader2pml.py as you suggested), and it is an apple-to-apple copy (on display), albeit difference in filesize.
Again, thanks for the nice tool.

tlpp