Michael Joyce asked about e-book readers for the webbook, specifically for reading Project Gutenburg texts, it turns out there is indeed a great reader for them, GutenBrowser. This can be installed from the Synaptic package manager, just look down the list for gutenbrowser and install it. It does not appear to have added an icon to the menu but you can start it from alt-F2 then type gutenbrowser and hit the run button. The first thing you have to do is go to Settings-Server Settings and point it at a Gutenburg mirror. I had some problems with the UK mirrors so I am now pointing at the project Gutenburg reading room at the bottom of the list. Once you have selected a server you can go to Library-update to collect the list of titles available, then just browse the list and it will download books on demand. Currently I am reading “A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees” and contemplating the possibility of having Free Honey to go with my Free Eggs.
The problem with that is that its against US copyright law, which meens that many books that are out of copyright here in the UK/EU are not available, specifically H.P. Lovecraft books i noticed.
You can get those texts from http://wikisource.org though, its more copyright independant and thus has books from places such as the uk where the copyright as run out.
Thanks for the info Alan, Gord; I downloaded the Gutenbrowser software and had immediate problems with downloading books. I set the FTP download location to the suggested location but had no success, and tried a couple of other locations with the same result. Not one to give in easily I fired up Firefox and manually downloaded a couple of books to the desktop and then imported them. Ah – ah now it was working, but the next time I started Gutenbrowser the books were not in the local library directory and it kept crashing. I had another trawl through the Synaptic listings and found “FBReader”, and downloaded that. I have only had it on my machine for five minutes but I like it a lot, the display is much better for starters, and it seems both simpler and more powerful at the same time if you can get your head around that. I had to fiddle with the preferences for about two milliseconds to get it to load plain .txt documents and then I was able to read one of my sample downloads. Isn’t Linux great? All that software, and all free, and some of it is good to boot!
I’ll report further on FBReader when I’ve played with it for a while..
I downloaded Gutenbrowser and I am very impressed with it. It is much easier to read books than simply downloading on to the desktop and opening them on screen as I used to do. I would however like to know if there is any way to put a shortcut to Gutenbrowser on the desktop to make it quicker and easier to open? I have been unable to find any way of doing this.
FBreader looks nice too. Probably a bit better in some ways, but I think the Gutenburg library integration gives gutenbrowser the edge for me. Nice to be able to choose though isn’t it!
if you right click the desktop and create a launcher you should be able to put gutenbrowser in the command field, you can name it whatever you like and select an icon for it from a fairly big list.
Thanks Alan – success.
Another useful ebook-related program is Calibre http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/. This allows you to manage library collections, convert from and to various formats, should you have more than one device, and (the feature I like very much) it will download news from whichever news site you ask it to and form it into an electronic newspaper.
More thoughts on ebooks and such:- I think what prompted me to try and use the webbook as an e-book reader was seeing all the press comments about the Kindle e-book reader. Hold on I thought, I’ve already got a lightweight electronic device suitable for carrying around and with enough storage for loads of e-books, and that prompted my original email. So now I have the equivalent to a Kindle ebook reader, but it’s also lots of other things as well. After playing with FBReader for a little longer I must admit that it is quite a simple program compared to “Gutenbrowser”, but, and this is a big but, what it does, it does extremely well. The text is displayed in a very clear and readable manner, there are no electronic bookmarks to set, but the reader remembers where you got to anyway when you close and reopen the program. Most usefully it puts itself into the Applications list under Office, so you can launch it with one click.
Good tip from aitch about Calibre, I will investigate that later this week I think.