City of IF

HalfEmptyHero · Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2011 9:57 am Post subject: Do you use an ebook reader?

I've been thinking about ways to get me to read more on the site, and one of the issues I have is that I hate reading from a computer screen. So then I started thinking; I have a Kindle, and I love reading it. It would work well for critiquing someone's work, as you can make highlights, comments, etc. I also happen to use calibre, a program for managing your ebook library. Using it you can download feeds daily and automatically and have them sent to your ebook reader automatically. For a kindle, it will email it to your kindle.com or free.kindle.com email address to deliver it wirelessly. All this without you having to do anything. It comes with several different "recipes" for downloading news and such, but you can also create your own using python (a programming language). While I'm not expert in python, I do know some and I think that I may be able to write a recipe for downloading from our rss feed. If I am able to do this, would anyone else be interested?

Thunderbird · Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2011 10:28 am Post subject:

GREAT idea... I have no idea how to implement it. Ingro may but he's pretty distracted at the moment.

Out of curiosity, if you wanted to upload something to your kindle, what filetype and method must you employ to do so? I don't have one so I haven't been able to get any hands on understanding of how they work, though I HAVE been sensing that our future survival could depend on such an understanding.

HalfEmptyHero · Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2011 10:36 am Post subject:

The default format for a kindle is a .mobi for unencrypted ebooks and .azw for DRM encrypted ebooks (of course you can break this with relative ease ;) ), but you can also send pdfs and plain text files. However, calibre is able to convert between a variety of formats. a .epub is a pretty popular format for ebooks, and calibre is able to convert that to a .mobi.

I rarely buy books on the Kindle; if I am going to pay money for a book, I want the book. However, there are sites like gutenberg.org where you can download thousands of books out of copyright for free. That's what I mainly use mine for.

Thunderbird · Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2011 10:44 am Post subject:

So PDFs are good? I'm just wondering, for myself, if I were to include a download link for my chapters in PDF format, would that be easy enough for a kindle user do you think?

HalfEmptyHero · Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2011 10:53 am Post subject:

Sure, that would work. But I was just fooling around with calibre, and I definitely can get it do download the feeds. The only problem is, it downloads both chapters and comments. If we could somehow integrate the rss feed with the chapter feature, it would be really easy to get it to work. That might be complicated though, and probably beyond my php skills. Maybe if Ingro was willing to check it out, but I think he said he was going to be busy for a while.

Thunderbird · Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2011 10:59 am Post subject:

Wouldn't it be preferable to download comments too? That's the heart of the city interaction isn't it? Debating and discussing the decision points? We've largely lost this art here but at one time, playful arguments over what to do with the DP were much of the fun.

Otherwise... that's really cool you got that running!

HalfEmptyHero · Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2011 11:48 am Post subject:

True enough. I also would prefer it if the signatures weren't sent in the rss as well, but I guess I'm just being nitpicky. I'll write up a little howto in case anybody is interested.

Vishal Muralidharan · Joined: 24 Aug 2010 Posts: 867 Location: City Of IF!

HalfEmptyHero wrote: I'll write up a little howto in case anybody is interested.

Well, I am.

Brilliant idea there, HEH! :D

Muaddib · Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1765

I found this site: http://dotepub.com/

You can use it to convert a webpage to epub format.

Chinaren · Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2011 4:09 am Post subject:

I use an Asus Transformer as a book reader when I have it with me. Otherwise I use my HTC Desire HD as an ebook reader. Both are Android, and have many apps available to read in any number of formats (PDF, Word, epub, mob etc).

I also have an RSS reader app that reads all the posts on Tome directly from the RSS feed. It automatically updates every x hours with all new posts. You should easily be able to get the same RSS reader app to do the same for IF, or any other forum/webpage for that matter.

There are also apps that can do this in a more specialized way. There's Tapatalk for most common platforms, for example. You have to set it up in the forum directory first. Not sure if it works on this old version on PHPBB though.