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Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

babluboy.github.io

81–90 of 271 posts

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Calibre is full of quirks, seemingly lacks some reasonable features (like importing metadata from book files themselves) and stuck with Python 2. I wish there were alternatives...

When I add books to Calibre, it reads and lists all the metadata correctly. I never added metadata to a book manually if the book has it. Strange. I can't comment on the Python2.x dependencies though.

Calibre author have said that despite python2 eol he will not transition to python3 and that he is "perfectly capable of maintaining python2 himself"

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#82
Maybe I'm old school, but I don't understand the concept of a "library". I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and amazingly powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader).

Why would an ebook reader even try to do the navigation for me? It should display an ebook, and I'll take care of the rest.

If it's showing me the file system, it's redundant. If it's showing me the "library" according to its own logic, then it breaks the consistency. And it makes my life so much harder (eg. where do I find all those books when I want to copy them?).

I hate Calibre for the exact same reason.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the ppa, but doing that opens you up to security concerns. I've tried to build from source, but there are too many dependencies and I couldn't build it due to conflicting libraries.

If you trust the PPA you added, does it open you up to any other concerns?

In an ideal case, no. In a not-so-ideal case, one with the push access could theoretically replace any package on your system with a malicious version that you would pick up automatically using apt upgrade.

I'd trust PPAs more if they didn't have such broad possibility of misuse. For example, if I add a PPA that only contains package A, I should at least be warned if that PPA tries to install or upgrade package B. apt will only display that package B needs to be installed/upgraded, it won't inform me that it originated from that PPA.

I applaud elementary OS for not bundling software-properties-common by default (a package that allows you to run add-apt-repository). If you decide to install it, you should at least be forced to make an effort to open such possibility of misuse.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#84
post #7

Ooh, nice. I’ve used Calibre for years, it’s fully featured but god help me it is ugly as sin.

I've created 80+ ebooks using Calibre, but it's too over-featured for casual ebook reading. I've used IceCream for that but I'll give Bookworm a look.

Mupdf ( https://mupdf.com ) also supports ePub. I personally using it with zathura for vi keybindings and theme support ( https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura-pdf-mupdf )

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Calibre is full of quirks, seemingly lacks some reasonable features (like importing metadata from book files themselves) and stuck with Python 2. I wish there were alternatives...

When I add books to Calibre, it reads and lists all the metadata correctly. I never added metadata to a book manually if the book has it. Strange. I can't comment on the Python2.x dependencies though.

Every time I drag a book file (whatever a format, whatever a source) to Calibre it can only guess the title and the author from the file name (although ebook formats like fb2, epub and mobi usually have this data embedded inside them). It can't even extract the cover (something CoolReader on Android does easily). Then I have to copy-paste ISBN manually and click "download metadata". I have always suspected the feature is there (it seems unreasonable to be missing from such a tool) but doesn't work for some weird reason. I use Calibre 3.39.1 from AUR on Manjaro.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I add books to Calibre, it reads and lists all the metadata correctly. I never added metadata to a book manually if the book has it. Strange. I can't comment on the Python2.x dependencies though.

Every time I drag a book file (whatever a format, whatever a source) to Calibre it can only guess the title and the author from the file name (although ebook formats like fb2, epub and mobi usually have this data embedded inside them). It can't even extract the cover (something CoolReader on Android does easily). Then I have to copy-paste ISBN manually and click "download metadata". I have always suspected the featur…

I'm using Calibre 3.35 on Debian Testing and I have all authors, tags, categories, series, everything automatically imported to my library for many books from many sources. Maybe there's a library dependency missing somewhere? Any debug logs?

I'm not at my main workstation at home, so I cannot compare now, but it's a very strange situation.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#88
post #7

Ooh, nice. I’ve used Calibre for years, it’s fully featured but god help me it is ugly as sin.

I actually really like Calibre's UI for nostalgic reasons. The oversized icons remind me a lot of WinZip 98, which was one of the few programs I remember back from when I was 5 years old.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#89
Oh my god finally! I can't believe this! I've been looking for an app like this forever! I was so surprised at how hard it is to find a decent ebook reader for Ubuntu.

All the desktop or chrome apps I've tried miss crucial obvious functionality, or are so ugly and painful to use they make me want to cry and throw things.

Thank you so much for making this project, it looks amazing, can't wait to try it out!

Edit:

I was unable to install it on ubuntu 18.04 because it requires libgranite5. To fix this I did:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip.scott/spice-up-daily

sudo apt install libgranite5

Now it works.

Feedback:

This app doesn't allow me to scroll through pages? I can only switch between them with arrow keys? That's a huge bummer, pretty much a dealbreaker for me. Everything else looks great.

Oh, and looks like it completely breaks PDF formatting for me. I love that it adds a dark mode, but it makes them pretty much unreadable. Table of content's broken as well, chapter names replaced with Content #1, Content #2, etc. And some fonts are missing, hard to figure out which, but I can't read some text in the pdf because of this.

Please fix these things, I really wish to use this app!

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#90
post #82

Maybe I'm old school, but I don't understand the concept of a "library". I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories, and amazingly powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). Why would an ebook reader even try to do the navigation for me? It should display an ebook, and I'll take care of the rest. If it's showing me the file system, it's redundant. If it's showing…

Metadata. The same way you might group music files per artist or per album or per genre or in playlists but the filesystem only allows for 1 type of grouping without duplicating the files or some weird shortcut kind of thing. You can group per author or per genre of ebooks or whatever. Granted it's less useful compared to music but it does make sense and I prefer media to be displayed as a library myself.
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