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FBReader and its .fb2 format

FBReader is a very good program, free too, for a very important application, mobile eBook-reading. It handles a good, useful selection of eBook formats though the support for some popular formats is missing.

It is really irritating to see that tremendous but stupid amount of different eBook formats. Why so? It cannot be useful but makes the everyday life more complicated.

And now again: FBReader uses a new format, .fb2 as the default format. Looking at Memoware eBook site which is a huge, free bookstore and has excellent specs about the formats tied with the eBook in question. But no trace about .fb2 (stands for Fiction Book 2.) And if I remember correct, I have never seen the .fb2 format at other eBook libraries too. So, where are the .fb2 eBooks?

Well, very nice reader but what is behind of using a brand new format as the default format? Is it better or what?

I can only surmise there's something specific about the format and the Range of languages and character sets.

Oddly, I want it to support one more format - eReader encrypted format but I can't see that ever happening.

This isn't a 'new' format -- just new to us. It's well established in Russia, where the creator is from (lives?)..

Besides, which of your other e-book readers handles both Cyrillic AND Chinese? FB2 is far more accessible than the other formats around, and FBReader more open in formats it will display natively than any other I can think of off the top of my head.

So ignore it if you want, and just read plucker files, or txt or html files without any conversion necessary.

BTW, what other reader is even available on Linux? Plucker GTK+. Period.

Did I critize the FBreader itself? No. It is the best eBook reader - for 770. However, its capability to open eBooks in Chinese or Cyrillic etc letters, doesn't warm me up, because I understand Western letters only.

It's not very productive that this "new/old", as the default used .fb2 format has practically no eBooks available - well, Western.
Why promote such a useless feature?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Maerra

I suspect it's not intended to "warm" you up, it does little for me as an English speaker. But then the new/additional formats it supports don't make it any less effective an application.

Quote:

It's not very productive that this "new/old", as the default used .fb2 format has practically no eBooks available - well, Western.
Why promote such a useless feature?

It's not intrusive, the library and the app as a whole show no preference for .fb2 format so I'm struggling to see why it's such a big issue for you.

I'm writing this much later than the original inquiry, but I have now a little better understanding of FBReader and of the FB2 format.

For my initial period of reading, I stuck with books in the Plucker format, although occasionally I read material in html and plain text. All three of these can be put into a zip archive to make them smaller, and FBReader will open them fine.

I started to convert some of the html files to Plucker in order to add some links and such -- FBReader won't link to #names in html unless they're on an <a> element, I've since learned, which was the initial problem -- and some of that went well and some of it was awkward or unsuccessful. From inexperience mostly, I think.

But that led me to look for information about the FB2 format. You can readily enough convert html files to FB2-marked up files and from them use free utilities to make books in the FB2 format. From a user's standpoint, FBR markup is XML not HTML and it includes a great deal of metadata, some of which will go directly into FBReader's library. HTML's paragraph (<p>) tags and <body> and anchor <a> tags show up, but many others are added, and a certain structure is specified for where titles may go, which enables Tables of Contents to be built by the conversion program.

And FB2 format brings up each footnote in a separate window, instead of the crude method of making them all endnotes and just linking to them and then pressing the back arrow to return to the text.

So as a publisher/bookmaker, I find that the FB2 format has a lot to recommend it.

As a reader, I'm very happy with reading Plucker, html and text files in FBReader. But I have found many English language texts, especially at FictionBook.lib, in the FB2 format.

Re: FBReader and its .fb2 format

Hi

I wonder whether you can help me get my FBreader in my Nokia 770 to get html and other files into the FBR library where I made a subdirectory "books". I was told to download xterm and put a link to my memory card: /media/mmc1/books. Is this the complete line of code? As I have written the code, there seems to be an instruction absent like Mkdr or something. I'm not a programmer!

My desktop FBreader converts files fine. Is there a way of converting the html files on my desktop and then transferring them to the FBreader on the Nokia? I can't access these FBreader files outside the programme.

Raphael

Re: FBReader and its .fb2 format

Sorry, I made the subdirectory "books" on the memory card.