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Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

babluboy.github.io

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Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#161

Post by nebulous1 »

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…

I think you're both right and wrong here.

You're right that this often causes problems. Anybody who has tried to salvage an iTunes library can attest to that.

However you're downplaying the positives to having a metadata database, and you're also ignoring the teeming masses who don't care about the layout of the file system as long as it's displayed in the app.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#162

Post by taude »

dingaling wrote: post #76
radicalbyte wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is being sold for what, $5 and is actively being supported. I assume that it's being developed by a single developer in their own time. If charging for it lets them make a living from their clearly valuable work then what's the problem? Working on open source is fantastic but most realistic projects are sponsored in some way or form. I doubt that sponsorship works works for an eReader app, so this is a good soluti…

> 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…

Wait, so there's say 20 apps someone uses, maybe average $5/each, that's $100 for apps on a device you might pay $800+ for? Doesn't seem that ridiculous....

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#163

Post by kps »

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…

> Being able to sort, and find a book based on other information becomes much more useful: date of publication, genre, custom tags, etc...

Yes, and I want to be able to do that with all my books, not just the ones that the ebook reader can handle.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#164

Post by taude »

Kaiyou wrote: post #136
nambit wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lifetime in software assumes the lifetime of the app, not the user.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#165

Post by weehobbes »

IanCal wrote: post #139
wp381640 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think this is a common case for "regular users" but in my library of coding books, I find both very useful. For example, O'Reilly has a very different style/quality compared to Packt. And it's helpful to know when the book was published to know it's recency and whether it may be outdated.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#166

Post by kingaillas »

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…

I was like you, until my library grew to a certain size and I needed/wanted to organize it and display it better. Calibre lets me tag books, so I can pull them up by arbitrary categories which I can't EASILY pull off only using filesystem features. With Calibre I split my ebooks into two libraries (one for computer books, one for not computer books) and tag to my hearts content and requirements. I keep it simple to 2-3 tags for each book so I can later find my computer books that are "python, security" or my "reading challenge, crime/mystery, unread" books without dealing with extended attributes and the find command. Calibre also travels between linux, macos, and windows and so do the tags; unlike the filesystem where I'd get the joy of retagging all this stuff if I am on a different system (say, copy of my stuff on Windows means I have to retag with NTFS alternate data streams).

Same thing with pdf's - I used to keep a bunch of docs in my own subdir, until it got to be 1000+ pdf's and I discovered Mendeley Desktop and its tagging feature. Now I can find stuff much faster.

Same thing with my music collection, same thing my with photos.

Your needs may be minimal enough and your computer skills sufficient enough so that you get by with the filesystem, but I would venture to say the average user is much better off with an app/library method of organization. e.g., I can't fathom organizing a non-trivial photo collection via the filesystem only. I know I'm better off with the app/library method of organizing data, something I came to realize after my initial resistance.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#167

Post by sanderjd »

I was hoping this was an e-ink device. The Kindle Paperwhite is my favorite electronic device of all time, but I'd love it even more if it didn't prioritize buying books from Amazon. For instance, I haven't yet gotten it working with books from my library. Are there even better e-reader devices out there?

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#168

Post by PurpleRamen »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #147
PurpleRamen wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python2 will be at end of support next year. That means slowly it will become harder and harder to make calibre runable on modern systems. 3rd-party librays will decline and receive no updates. Python2-interpreter will not be installable out-of-the-box. There will be no security-updates or new features. Python2 as a platform will slowly die and any application depending on it will die with it. Though, this won't beco…

To be honest, I doubt corporations will give Python 2 up easily. Currently Python 2 codebase in use in production is probably fairly huge and is just working. Look at how hard it is to convince enterprises to give up Internet Explorer even though Microsoft itself says they should really end using it. Someone like Red Hat will probably keep maintaining Python 2 for at least some years more.

Indeed, but companies have full control over their software and used OS-Versions. They can virtualize, package or even compile themself, and fix problems in their own space.

But calibre is desktop-software, it depends on the OS, the GUI-Framework and whats more... Though, it's actually only a bigger deal for linux, beacuse on Windows and Mac OS is custom to deliver compiled versions from the Project itself. Also there is not wayland-situation on windows and Mac OS, which might break GUI-Libs. But as Calibre has so many different gears it's depending on, there is a good chance that something will break after a certain point.

> Someone like Red Hat will probably keep maintaining Python 2 for at least some years more.

Actually, Red Hat is already dropping python2 for their next enterprise-version as I read. They will probably still have a somewhat maintainend version available somehow, but it's obvious that python2 is slowly phasing out now. And many remaining companies are now starting transition too as EOL is near.

At this point you can already can predict that python2 will have reached minimal levels of usage in 5 years.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#169

Post by chme »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #133
chme wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Maybe I should make myself a bit clearer here:

I am not against an index or library in addition to the file hierarchy, but I am against a library or index replacing a directory listing.

Both perspectives are very valuable!

Also a full text search (grep) or (more or less simple) file search (find) are useful in addition to a library.

To reiterate, for me it seems that itunes and ebook reader generation of devices and applications don't seem to value custom directory organization.

> 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.

While the library part of calibre is very good, the reader part is not so great, but that just might be because a library application is much more difficult to implement than the reader, so bad UI can be looked over there, but not in the reader. Otherwise I agree that this the application of choice for reading ebooks on Linux desktop.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#170

Post by IanCal »

weehobbes wrote: post #165
IanCal wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think this is a common case for "regular users" but in my library of coding books, I find both very useful. For example, O'Reilly has a very different style/quality compared to Packt. And it's helpful to know when the book was published to know it's recency and whether it may be outdated.

Is that something you want to know after selecting a book, or for finding one?
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