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Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

babluboy.github.io

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Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#131

Post by ohithereyou »

kirion25 wrote: post #121
haspok wrote: 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…

With a file manager, you'll probably only be able to find a book from its author, and title. If you have a small collection, this is fine. When your collection grows though, issues start to show up. Being able to sort, and find a book based on other information becomes much more useful: date of publication, genre, custom tags, etc... While you could always integrate these in your filename/directory structure, with th…

>it's very cumbersome to manage and use

Maybe if you just dump a large number of unsorted files in place and do nothing with them. With a decent file manager and an hour or so, you can add many books and symlink them to the metadata directory with no issue.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#132

Post by SamuelAdams »

Looks like a great tool. I use Calibre but that has a few issues. For reference I have more than 10,000 e-books in various formats. The total size of this collection is somewhere around 200-300 GB. It sits on a network share.

Calibre insists on copying all my books to a local directory (~/Calibre Library). My laptop has a 128GB SSD, so that will never work. Will Bookworm do this too?

I would prefer it just create a local folder for the metadata, then reference the documents on the network share. But if you want to write the metadata to the same directory as the books, that's cool too.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#133

Post by PurpleRamen »

chme wrote: post #124
PurpleRamen wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories Your library. > powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical views and don't integrate well with filetypes. Namely, they usually don't extract data from files, like metadata, covers or previews. Though, filemanagers have started to do that to some degree. Bu…

>> I have directories on my filesystem(s), files in those directories > Your library. Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories. Now ebook readers came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times, because it needs to index first. >> powerful applications to navigate them (Total Commander / mc / Krusader). > Not powerful enough. Filemanagers are optimized for hierachical vie…

> Yes, its already there and quite organized in directories.

So you do understand the general concept of a library. Then you also understand the limitations of directories and how much work goes in maintaining this system.

> Now ebook readers came along and pressed those hierarchical data flat, with long waiting times, because it needs to index first.

I don't think Ebook-readers started this. ITunes had this first I think, or whatever app ITunes copied from back then.

> grep and find works quite well for most work loads and are fast, why not enhance (or fork) them to support ebook formats?

Doesn't solve the problem. Grep and find don't give a useful interface for elaborated tasks. They also don't support metadata which are not supported by a fileformat, meaning "external" metadata.

> And at the same time omit very useful information that normal file managers show. (File creation/write/access time, size, full file name, etc.)

Depends on the application, and the user. Not all of those information are useful for everyone. Calibre for example has good support for filemanagers. Each entry has a link to open the folder with the ebooks. The whole library is saved as a folder-hierachy with metadate extrated into seperate files. The Database-View is just an additional layer.

> As I said, with long indexing times. I had ~50000 books on a ebook reader once and that broke it. Just because there are files stored, that should not slow down the system or even make it completely unusable.

Indexing is a neccessary tradeoff for gaining power. The alternative would be to constantly scan all files, making every single task slower. grep and find have their price too.

> But very few ebook applications and handheld readers have the same resources to implement a similarly powerful library functionality. Instead they have half backed solutions that make finding and organizing the library more difficult then if they would have simply used a standard file manager and grep/find/...

Oh yeah, I guess grep on an eReader would be a real pleasure to use...

> IMO an application that lets you just open epubs and other ebook formats and render them correctly just like so many pdf viewer do, without any half assed library functionality duck taped on to it, is highly sought after.

Those applications exist. Calibre even comes with one out of the box. Not their fault if you just start the library and not the reader.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#134

Post by raffomania »

josteink wrote: post #129

The first thing this page should mention is why anyone would use this over Calibre. Calibre works for me. Why should I bother changing my setup?

Calibre is a complex beast that has a bad track record regarding security and will keep using python 2 even after its deprecation.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#135

Post by bayindirh »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #128
qwerty456127 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you mean you use Calibre to download books from particular sources so Calibre exchanges metadata with the source server directly? I add files manually by dragging them to the Calibre window and expect it to extract metadata (like the book autor, title, ISBN and cover picture) from the file.

I usually buy ebooks through Humble Bundle, download all formats and then import them into calibre. For 2 of 3 formats the metadata will be extracted without problems. Only one is usually lacking. I think it's mobi or epub, but never bother to pin it down because I just combine then in one entry anyway, and then the metadata will be merged together. Calibre has usually no problem with extracting metadata from files,…

It's possibly .mobi. Calibre reads all metadata from my HumbleBundle ePubs just fine. :)

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#136

Post by Kaiyou »

nambit wrote: post #100
dingaling wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our fellow developer deserves to get paid for their clearly awesome work I agree, but it highlights the many-small-cuts problem $5 for an eReader, then a mapping app, file manager, photo editor, mail client... the list of developers deserving support is longer than most people can afford. Eventually a choice has to be made to prioritise. For many people that will mean that a less-used category of app can be fulfill…

Is it really that great? How many apps do we use in our day to day life? Let's say 20 apps that we use regularly. Is $100 too much for lifetime access to these apps?

Lifetime is very misleading. I expect smartphones and apps to become obsolete over the next 40 years. Just like pretty much everything software from 40 years ago is obsolete now.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#137

Post by josteink »

raffomania wrote: post #134
josteink wrote: post #129

The first thing this page should mention is why anyone would use this over Calibre. Calibre works for me. Why should I bother changing my setup?

Calibre is a complex beast that has a bad track record regarding security and will keep using python 2 even after its deprecation.

It does what I need (for instance decrypting Amazon purchases), runs locally and will only process trusted input, not to mention it seems to be gradually migrated to Python 3. I’m not overly worried.

For an upcoming competitor, security is only a feature if it also does everything else I need it to.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#138

Post by rafaelvasco »

I just use Calibre for organizing and editing metadata. To read i just use whatever epub or pdf reader. For me , Calibre does everything I need. Every book organized by group, then author. Every book with its book cover. If it doesn't have one Calibre can generate for me etc. And on top of it all, Calibre generates a neat folder structured with everything properly named. When you have hundreds of books it is a must.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#139

Post by IanCal »

wp381640 wrote: post #97
haspok wrote: 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…

books are more than just files and contain a lot of additional data. how do you filter by publisher and then sort books by publish date in mc? I'm sure there's a "dropbox is just rsync" type answer, but this is for regular users

Honest question, is this a common use case for regular users? To get a book by publisher and date? I have no idea who published most of my books, let alone the date.
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