eBook library management

[Pat McCotter]

The announcement for the non-violence lectures reminded me of the electronic library software I use to manage my books. It is Calibre and is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

[Pat K]

Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Another trinity, but we won't get into that.

[Lloyd Danforth]

I just put them on a shelf, right up tight on each other and find they don't need management.

[Pat McCotter]

I tried that but the electrons kept flying away.

[Lloyd Danforth]

Lead shield

[Sutherland]

I just picked up a Nook last week, rooted the android OS and installed the improved ROM from nookdevs.com yesterday. I've been using Calibre to manage the content and have no complaints about it. Its easy to dump the smaller native ebook formats direct on the Nook and the fatter PDF files on the microSD card. I'm in the middle of reading Lysander Spooner's No Treason in epub format at the moment. My motivation for picking up an ebook reader is that much of what I plan to read over the next year is old stuff that is freely downloadable. The site http://oll.libertyfund.org has a wealth of material. I picked the Nook over the new Kindle because of its native open standard ePub support. That may not have been all that critical though because, Calibre seems to work quite well at converting one format to another. I suspect that the server feature of Calibre can be utilized if I have too much content and want to archive content off my ebook reader. As for other tools, I've only used the native kindle and nook applications on Windows and I think they are junk compared what Calibre can do.

[Pat McCotter]

What does the better ROM do that the original didn't?

I bought the Kobo because it was cheaper (at the time) and doesn't give me the things I don't need. It doesn't do well on PDF files but I am doing fine with the available epubs.

Mises has a good selection also.
http://mises.org/books/

[Sutherland]

The primary reason I went with the modified ROM was because the factory ROM only allows you to search your Barnes & Noble library of books that you got from them. You can't do search on your own books that you uploaded from something like Calibre. This was likely intentional by Barnes and Noble to encourage you to purchase books through them rather getting them for free. If you only have 10 books on the device it not an issue but once I dropped 100+ books on it and had to keep paging through the list I decided updating to the modified ROM was worth it.

There's other benefits like being able to use some android apps like Pandora radio, alternative content downloaders, and maybe some future hacks like getting an ssh terminal. The site http://nookdevs.com would have the full details.

The Nook (either ROM) isn't the best at viewing PDF files (or ePub files converted from PDF) but I think that has more to do with the fact that PDF is an image based format rather than a text based format. I suspect all eBook readers may have that issue although the larger screen models may be better at it.

[Pat McCotter]

The Nook (either ROM) isn't the best at viewing PDF files (or ePub files converted from PDF) but I think that has more to do with the fact that PDF is an image based format rather than a text based format. I suspect all eBook readers may have that issue although the larger screen models may be better at it.

Thanks for the review. I had assumed that the 5" and 6" screens would all have a problem with the PDFs because of the small size. The larger screens would be better for them.

I watched e-readers since the Kindle came out. I was looking for something specific in an e-reader - I wanted to read books.

I didn't want to surf the web.
I didn't want to read a newspaper or magazine.
I didn't want to listen to music or audio books.
I didn't want to look at pictures.
I didn't want to watch videos.
I didn't want to charge the battery every few hours.

I wanted to read books and the Kobo gives me that. Of coues, the Kobo only allows epub and PDF at the moment. I have to convert text files or html to epub if I want to load them but Calibre is good at that.