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Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

babluboy.github.io

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Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#251

Post by calcifer »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #67
bayindirh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first reaction was also the same: "That's a nice reader, but I use Calibre, and can read my eBooks from it too". If I didn't have an eReader and didn't manage it with Calibre, I'd build and it use it happily. While Calibre has a full management, editing and authoring suite, it also has a nice internal reader with reading features. It's not like the Photoshop, but rather the ACDSee suite, which comes with a full fl…

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...

How does Calibre's use of Python 2 effect your use of the application?

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#252

Post by calcifer »

e12e wrote: post #202
frosted-flakes wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calibre with Apprentice Alf does a great, seamless job of DRM removal. Works for everything except iBooks, I think.

I was under the impression that Amazon drm v3 wasn't cracked?

It's not, but there is no urgency to it either. You can still download the old format from the Amazon (if you choose the "transfer via USB" option) or by using an older version of the Kindle app.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#253

Post by PurpleRamen »

ori_b wrote: post #250
PurpleRamen wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How good does that sync between devices?

If you have access to the files on a device, it will index the files.

Yes, but that does not replicate the view and configuration. What about custom fields? How does that work with indexer? And how do they sync?

The advantage of integrated solutions is that you have less work to replicate your workspace on a new device, often even no work at all. How well does that work with indexer? Spotlight does not even work indepedant of the platform, tracker is Gnome-ware, does it integrate with KDE or Non-KDE?

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#254

Post by enriquto »

FabHK wrote: post #175
HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> In Calibre it's trivial to sort the books by Title, Author, or (my self-defined and filled) Genre column.

honest question: why would you ever like to do that?

I find calibre unusable because of these things. I just have one epub file and I want to read it. However, the damn program forces me to "initialize my library" and other bullshit.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#255

Post by radarsat1 »

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…

>>> 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.

This has been a complaint of mine with music programs for, literally I think, decades. If you need to overlay some metadata that's fine, but in that case at least index it by header checksums or something, not by file names and paths! (Especially not absolute paths.) Please respect my organizational choices and make sure I can rename and move things around without worrying about "ruining" the database.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#256

Post by eeZah7Ux »

bayindirh wrote: post #155
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and it needs a huge amount of dependencies. And RAM.

It's a convoluted piece of software, which does a lot of things, but with ~160MB of RAM usage, I wouldn't call it a heavyweight. Its RAM requirement is more than the capacity of my first hard drive, but it's not in the league of Chrome, Slack or Atom. There are many wasteful applications out there doing much much less with much more resources.

You are cherry-picking memory hogs like "Chrome, Slack or Atom" as comparisons and ignoring bookworm and other more reasonable applications.

Also, I had to drop Calibre due to the large number of Python 2 and imagemagik dependencies that have a maintenance cost when it comes to pulling updated packages & so on.

Making Calibre modular would have helped greatly but the author never cared.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#257

Post by bayindirh »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #256
bayindirh wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a convoluted piece of software, which does a lot of things, but with ~160MB of RAM usage, I wouldn't call it a heavyweight. Its RAM requirement is more than the capacity of my first hard drive, but it's not in the league of Chrome, Slack or Atom. There are many wasteful applications out there doing much much less with much more resources.

You are cherry-picking memory hogs like "Chrome, Slack or Atom" as comparisons and ignoring bookworm and other more reasonable applications. Also, I had to drop Calibre due to the large number of Python 2 and imagemagik dependencies that have a maintenance cost when it comes to pulling updated packages & so on. Making Calibre modular would have helped greatly but the author never cared.

> You are cherry-picking memory hogs like "Chrome, Slack or Atom"...

Huge amount of RAM usage is subjective term. For me, Chrome, Slack and Atom are memory hogs. While I do not find the RAM usage of Calibre optimal, I think its RAM usage is reasonable with that feature set for me. Eclipse is also using ~1.1GB of RAM, but it's not a memory hog from my perspective, because I get what I give as productivity and features that I actually use and benefit.

>... ignoring bookworm and other more reasonable applications.

No, I'm not. Above, here [0], I said that Bookworm is a nice application, but my needs are different. Also, I compared Atom with another functionally-similar text application and said that similar applications (like BBEdit) use ~60MB, but Atom uses 660MB out of the box.

Similarly, since Bookworm doesn't provide the features that I need, installing it would be moot, since it'll sit unused on my disk, actually wasting disk space from my point of view. However, this doesn't make Bookworm a bad application. If it provides the functionality one needs, then I'm happy for them. Also its user interface is elegant and minimal, this another plus for Bookworm.

> Also, I had to drop Calibre due to the large number of Python 2 and imagemagik dependencies that have a maintenance cost when it comes to pulling updated packages & so on.

I don't know your OS and setup, and can't comment on that. However, major distros are doing the required maintenance, so many people are just installing it on their systems.

> Making Calibre modular would have helped greatly but the author never cared.

I don't know internal architecture of Calibre, so I can't say anything about this issue. However modularity has its own set of benefits and problems.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19197443

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#258

Post by firexcy »

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 the library system does have good reasons to exist and whether to use it depends totally on your needs.

Essentially, the library system and the traditional filesystem are the same, to the extent that they both filter and group files by a select group of criteria. In the case of the filesystem, the criteria are file path, sizes, date added, etc. In the case of a library system, the criteria are specific types metadata that are meaningful for the type of media it manages (genres and artists for music, publishers and categories for books, etc.). Their features do intersect, and you can have both worlds in one system with some hacks, but the convenience and design also matter.

For me, I read ebooks but don’t hoard them, so I don’t need Calibre to manage my petite amount of epubs -- folders and filenames are enough. But I do listen to a lot of music, so I can’t manage efficiently without a music library software like iTunes. A person who is a voracious reader but rare listener, however, may have a choice just opposite to mine, which is also completely reasonable.

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#259

Post by Causality1 »

skillachie wrote: post #220
unionpivo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do sometimes. I love my Kindle, and use it almost daily, for fiction and literature. But for work and hobbies I am flooded with PDF's (some spec sheets, but a lot of actual technical books). I tried different eBook readers, tablets etc. And I have found out I prefer reading them on my hires desktop monitor, where I can google details etc. And it's there that I usually need them. Also comics. For some reason I prefe…

Let me introduce you to BookFusion. BookFusion allows you to easily organize your eBooks regardless of format(PDF, MOBI,EPUB,DOC,TXT, FB2, CBZ and others) while allowing you to easily read on your desktop(Web), Android and iOS devices. You are able to easily send books to your Kindle from the same app using our Send To Kindle feature. More details at https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library PS: I am the found…

Looks interesting. Can it auto-crop the whitespace from around comic panels like some readers do?

Re: Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader

#260

Post by superhuzza »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #231
superhuzza wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall, the calibre UX isn't bad, especially given how powerful it is. The UI can be improved quite a bit, check out icon packs like this one: https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-calibre-th... For me, that looks pretty good, comparable to qBitorrent or 7zip.

I'm not talking about icons. I don't even use icons. Calibres menus, configuration and the general flow is very messy. Partly because calibre is doing so many different things, but partly also because it's just very unpolished.

Ah, fair enough. It could definitely do with an overhaul. It's still one of my favourite programs simply because of all it's functionality.
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