What Amazon Kindle? Here's an Open Source eBook Reader
What Amazon Kindle? Here's an Open Source eBook Reader
When it comes to an eBook reader, the choices are limited. The market is dominated by Amazon’s proprietary Kindle along with a few other options like Kobo, Nook and Onyx. An interesting news for open source enthusiasts is that a developer, Joey Castillo, is working on creating an open
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IIRC it only suports plain text files / Markdown rn. Not supporting EPUB is a non-starter for me. I use my Kobo right now and love it. If they add EPUB support i will heavily consider building one.
Yeah it's an interesting project, but it looks bad with the printed case and exposed tact switches, and seems to have little functionality.
The creator is working on an epub-to-text-file converter here:
I'm not sure I understand, epub is both the industry standard and an open format, as far as I know. Why not work on using it or build it around epub from the get-go?
I have to admit I'll have to wait for the project to start implementing epub to consider getting on board, but it's still a great effort.
It looks like it is powered by a microcontroller. Maybe it isn't powerful enough to support epub?
It's a 120mhz Arm CPU. That's more than enough for epub. For comparison the 25 Mhz 68030 in the Next computer used Adobe Postcript (PDF) as it's GUI.
Probably because the computational hardware is not powerful enough to implement a (proto) web browser
It's a raspberry pi pico. Ebooks could probably work with it on the new version.
It said it's a 120mhz SAMD51 ARM Cortex-M4.
There's a version with the pi pico https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book
Doesn't calibre also have a built in converter?
It used to be able to strip DRM from stuff too, but I think they got rid of that for legal reasons.
Yes, Calibre can convert to most formats.
DRM removal is not a feature of Calibre, but of plugins you can add to it. Kobo and Adobe DRM have plugins available. Amazon DRM plugin is in a poor state as Amazon cracked down on a major method earlier this year.
Think I did it that way for some books.
I also seem to remember there being another workaround, by exporting it to my old sony e-reader via the official sony app, which is so old it doesn't have proper DRM, but I did have to sign up for adobe digital editions or some or other BS. Something like that. End result was a DRM free epub.
Huge waste of time, especially for something I'd paid full price for, so after that I gave up on buying ebooks, and simply pirated them.
Just like with DVDs back in the day and streaming now, you get a shittier experience if you pay full price. Better to pirate.
Calibre already does this but cool we have options.
Epub to text is very easy and Pandoc can do it. I end up using lynx -dump because that's faster though.
Technically, epub is basically a wepage and thus everything but easy.
You could just strip out the content with a big regex. Surely nothing could go wrong with ̴̬̮̳͔̬̹͖̩͍̄̈̓̀͋̀̎̊̈́̑͛͊̕t̶̘͇̺̠̗̓̿̆̓͋͗́͑͆̈́̈́͊̉̈̍̚ͅḥ̷̡̛͓̹͕̞͎̃͂̽͠ͅã̸͈̟̩̫̪̣̳̜̑̈́̓͗͘t̴̡̮̹͌́̄̔̂́̒͑͘.
You can unzip an epub and find out. Ive done it a couple of times to remove some images from books.
unzip book.epubLast time someone told me I could find out if I would just unzip it didn’t go so well…