eBook Formats
 

I having trouble figuring out what eBook format to buy my books in or which eBook reader to even install.

My problem is that the eBook readers tell you what format they support by telling you the file format, e.g html, xml etc, but the eBook sites I've visited sell three formats, Adobe, Microsoft, and PalmOS.

Where can I find information on which format to purchase the book in and which eBook reader should I install? Plucker sounds cool since it can download web pages to read offline, but FBReader also supports Plucker but seems to support more formats as well.

Hi,
If the only format you can buy are Adobe, Microsoft or PalmOS, your only choice is Adobe : there is a PDF reader on the 770 (but does it support password protected files ?)
The plucker format is supported on PalmOS but the "standard" format for PalmOS ebook is "doc" (nothing related to Word though) & I don't think this format is supported on the 770 (yet ?)

Fred

It is my understanding that the Palm Doc format is their standard data file format with .pdb extension. Both FBreader and Plucker can use it.

Yes, the PDF viewer on the 770 does. Our payslips are passworded PDFs emailed to us. I forwarded one to my 770 and was able to open it fine after entering the password for the file.

Well.... Kind of. FBReader mangles PalmDoc files with a bug that causes lines to run together; the last letter on first line and the first letter on the next line have no space between them when you ask it to strip out CRs. Leaving the CRs in looks terrible because the document is usually formatted for lines>70 characters wide if you've converted a text file to PalmDoc (like Project Gutenberg files).

Larry

I think a lot of different programs used the basic Palm DB structure, but Plucker pdb files are not like any other pdb files. So I would say that FBReader and probably Plucker Viewer can't read any other file that happens to use a pdb extension.

Also, I think that DRM-protected files in the Adobe format require Adobe Reader to open; these are not the same as password-protected PDF's.

In fact, as far as I know, there are no e-readers at all on Linux that can open any DRM-protected e-book.

What I have done is use VNCviewer on the 770 to control my PC and open up texts in Microsoft Reader there. I wrote a blog item at Teleread that mentioned this (Why are e-readers standoffish?). I found I could set the PC display to 800 x 600 and see every line of type on an MS Reader page; the top and bottom margins were reduced, however.

Of course, the same process would work with DRMed Adobe files.

Personally, I like FBReader a great deal. I've found that FictionBook.lib (the URI is actually FictionBook.ru) has plenty of books in English and that plus Project Gutenberg and Cory Doctorow and other places has kept me satisfied on the reading front.

I use the Plucker generator when I get books from Project Gutenberg, btw. That provides better formatting information for FBReader than html or plain text.

So buying ebooks from sites like ebooks.com is a no go?

For the time being. Lets hope that this changes.

Finding ebooks to buy, in the format .fb2, seems so far to be impossible, but don’t give up, you can still get a lot of ebooks free of charge.

Her: http://www.gutenberg.org/
Her: http://www.fictionbook.ru/en/

Format I have found useful are: .fb2 .pdb .txt and .html
Some of them I read in the FBReader and some in the Plucker eBook Reader.

I may have to have different format in my PC an on my 770 for the same book.

On www.gutenberg.org/ I have found books in my own language and on www.fictionbook.re/en/ I read books in English.

TTP

I have pretty much been formatting e-books myself. I'll start with either a raw text file or an HTML formatted file. Either way, I have to make a few modifications to make them look good in FBreader. Here are some tips:

• Don't worry about most formatting. FBreader doesn't recognize CSS or even most style information. It understands bold and italics. It doesn't understand centering. You have no control over paragraph break style; paragraphs are automatically single-spaced and indented. If you want to skip a line, do the old <p>&nbsp;</p> trick. I usually try to strip out most everything else.
• Chapter and section heads should be formatted as H1, H2 etc. in HTML. This will not only bold them and put them in large-format type, but FBreader will also insert an automatic page break before them and add them to the automatically-generated table of contents. This way you will be able to jump to individual chapters.
• FBreader does not support most HTML entities. I know it does support &mdash;.
• FBreader does support embedded JPEG and GIF images in HTML documents. Use relative paths; these work within Zip files too (and you will want to Zip your files)
• Most esoteric tip: I like to read books using the serif font, and I find that printer's (curly) quotes look better/more readable than straight quotes. I tried a lot of things to get them to work, but most methods don't. FBreader does not support the <q> tag. Inserting curly quotes into normal text HTML files doesn't work. FBreader does not understand the HTML character codes for them. The one way I found to do it is to save the HTML document as UTF-8, including the correct http-equiv header, and embed the curly quote characters in the raw text. FBreader understands UTF-8 and so picks up the quote characters correctly. The one caveat to this method is that the word wrap features sees the curly apostrophe as a whitespace character; if it happens at the end of a line, FBreader will break the word on the apostrophe.

If anybody else comes up with other useful tips I'd like to hear them.

The folks at Pepperpad seemed to have convinced mobibook to make a version of their reader for linux on the pepperpad. So maybe there is hope for other platforms. I assume this means mobibook DRM'd books would be possible.

For non-DRM sci-fi/fantasy books that you can purchase, my favorite place is Baen's webscription site.

I believe FBReader will accept numeric character entities, so you can use &#38;#8220; and &#38;#8221; for open and closed quotes, and &#38;#8217; for right single quote (that is, apostrophe). Only thing is, the line break algorithm appears to take this as a word break, so a contraction like "don't" can break between the apostrophe and "t", as you describe.

I prefer to format the book in FB2. Then I can choose how the text appears using the Format and Styles tabs. This allows both for centering headlines and indenting the first line of body paragraphs. There are tools for converting html into FB2 format, but the main text must be one file, not a series of html files as connected chapters, say.

Mobipocket have stated that we need the Java Virtual Machine on the 770 before they are gonna develop a reader. I made a post about it on my site. I guess the Pepperpad has a Java Virtual Machine.

On the FBreader page, under FB2 format it says "style attributes are not supported yet." I took that to mean bold, underline, etc. If that's not what it means then what does it mean?

I'm not sure.

At first, I took it the same way you did — no italic or bold.

Obviously FBReader does show those. And you can style each paragraph as to font, size, alignment, indent, etc.

FictionBook 2.0 resists the notion of the book carrying formatting information in it, but allows CSS as a concession for printing. The only thing I can think of is that the statement means FBReader will not apply a CSS style sheet to the text, even if the FB2 file references it.

Well, not "the only thing." Maybe instead it means the program will ignore it if you apply a style attribute to an html element (such as <p style="text-align:center"> ).

For those who were looking to be able to buy ebooks in a readable format, I might recommend fictionwise.com as they offer lots of books in HTML and other formats which should be quite usable on the 770. Or one could convert them to Plucker.

Jack