Notices

I just downloaded and installed the first public build of FBReader and I have to admit to being pretty impressed. It opened a plucker file I have on my 770 and displayed it very nicely, both in normal and full screen mode.

My two greatest problems with Plucker are not there - scrolling and forgetting where you are in the book - which is a major result as far as I am concerned

There's lots of settings to play with, but I have some work to do so that will need to wait but all-in-all a nice addition to the software.

http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/

Hm-m-m. The Application Catalog lists that page too, but this morning it's still showing the message that FBReader for Maemo is not yet available. (But now it IS. See next post.)

Hope Misha didn't run into a last-minute snag. It's a great reader. See topicalweb.com/making-ebooks/fbreader-captures.htm for some indication of what the reader looks like.

Edited to add:
More info in the blog item at www.internettablettalk.com/blog/?p=176 which points to those screen captures.
and: See next post.

http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/maemo/ shows a .deb download now.

Now all that's needed is speech synthesis. C'mon, the C64 did it with SAM.

Out of curiosity, are eBooks rendered or stored as text?

Depends what format you use. FBReader reads Plucker format which is encoded in some way, and a whole host of others:

fb2 e-book format (style attributes are not supported yet).
Html format (text-only, tables are not supported).
plucker format (embedded images are supported, tables are not supported).
Palmdoc (aportis doc).
zTxt (Weasel format).
Plain text format.
Direct reading from tar, zip and gzip archives. (Multiple books in one archive are supported).

From: http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/

Flite has been ported to the 770 along with some other text to speech utilities.

Can't get it to output directly to the soundcard yet (makes a wav file instead), but I know the developer is working on it.

This is really interesting.

I downloaded the arm binary but couldn't get anything to work. I don't think I got as far as making a wav file.

But TTS on a handheld with e-books is a wonderful possibility. I, let the record show (somewhere, can't track it down), said (eg, wrote) within the last month or so that it would likely be some years before TTS could be squeezed into the 770's space.

How great it is to be proven wrong! And so quickly! I would resign from the punditocracy in shame if only really-wrong predictions were allowed as a reason . . .

Roger

Well, if worse came to worse, they could always port SAM from the C64. It sounds no different than Stephen Hawking and didn't even take up the full 640 blocks on the disk. Blocks. *feels the wave of nostalgia*

Excellent, yet another way of using my 770. Tell me, where could I find a good supply of (hopefully free) e-books?

Wonders Zup