I just want a reader that can turn my e books into audio books for when I'm driving.
Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
171–180 of 271 posts
Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
#172Oh, pity, I thought that was about hardware. (I keep buying up the good old Amazon Kindle 5 (with the hardware keys) on ebay and other sites - I lose it all the time, and don't want this annoying expensive newfangled stuff with touch screen that frequently switches to some random page).
Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>To reiterate, for me it seems that itunes and ebook reader generation of devices and applications don't seem to value custom directory organization.
Do you primarily or only use one computer or one os?
I'm on 3 different OSes regularly, over 5 different computers counting ones at work. For me, the effort to setup custom directory organization is a complete waste of time unless structure and tags can easily travel between computers, filesystems, and OSes.
Letting the app (Calibre for books, Mendeley Desktop for pdf's) organize however it wants lets me just clone the directory and preserve tags, which is actually what is important to me (or in the case of Mendeley, log in and sync documents/tags). I'm not a music listener at work or I'd just let an app organize that too if it syncs my tags.
Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
#174Maybe 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…
Someone call up every real-world library and let them know their catalogs are worthless, they should just be sorting their books onto shelves and letting patrons search them by hand.
Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
#175Maybe 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.
Exactly. I am a big fan of Calibre for books, iTunes for music (granted, iTunes is mediocre monolithic software), and generally software (adapted to the specific media type) that manages the library and metadata, so I don't have to touch the filesystem.
How are you going to play music you've added in the last three years, but not heard for a month, from the "Latin" genre, with two or more stars, using only the file system? With an iTunes smart playlist, it's trivial.
In Calibre it's trivial to sort the books by Title, Author, or (my self-defined and filled) Genre column.
How would you even start to manage photos in the file system? By name?
Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
#176Maybe 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…
Someone call up every real-world library and let them know their catalogs are worthless, they should just be sorting their books onto shelves and letting patrons search them by hand.
> search them by hand
No, come on, be fair, let's replicate the capabilities of the file system: You can sort them both by ISBN and by size.
Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
#177Very nice design and best thing, it's not an Electron app. I will definitely try this reader.
I saw it depends on libwebkit2gtk, so I assumed it used web technology for its UI.
Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
#178Earlier 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…
>Instead ebook readers came along and reinvented filesystems, because users cannot be trusted to organize their book collection themselves.
In the early days of Mac OSX, iTunes actually did a great job of just organizing your music collection for you. It would sort your music into a nested hierarchy by artist, album, and track title based on the metadata on the file, which you could edit with iTunes. When you changed stuff around it would actually modify where the files were saved in the library folder.
It worked great. It was structured logically in your iTunes library, but organizing and tagging your iTunes library also wound up structuring your file system logically automatically. So there was never this sense of a pretty veneer over a messy clusterfuck underneath. The whole thing is designed to keep things tidy and organized.
Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
#179Oh, pity, I thought that was about hardware. (I keep buying up the good old Amazon Kindle 5 (with the hardware keys) on ebay and other sites - I lose it all the time, and don't want this annoying expensive newfangled stuff with touch screen that frequently switches to some random page).
I have a touchscreen Kindle that's a few years old now and I've never had the problem where it switches to a random page.
My next Kindle will probably be the Oasis model as it has hardware buttons for page turn. It's an expensive upgrade, but these things tend to last me a long, long time.
Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
#180Maybe 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…
Incredible. Top HN comment is wondering why anyone uses UI software to manage a library instead of the filesystem.
I'm not even sure where to start. But that you can't even envision a few reasons why someone would use something is very limiting. At least on an empathy level but probably on a professional product-design level as well.
I can certainly appreciate your point when the software's backing database is unusable and human-unfriendly, and this is supposedly the reason why you hate Calibre, but the folder that Calibre stores my 12k books in and it's nicely organized. The other day I even Airdropped it to my friend where he imported it into macOS' Books.app.