This Christmas Santa was very nice to me. He gave me a Cybook Gen 3 ebook reader. I’ve really been needing a new one since Tati has been monopolizing (this isn’t a bad thing) the Sony Prs505 we already had. Sadly the ebook management application I often use (Calibre) didn’t support the Cybook.
Calibre is an open source application and is written in Python. Both of these aspects are major benefits for the project. Being open source I was able to look at the code and create a driver for the Cybook. It has since been merged and released.
While looking over the driver code I noticed a lot of redundancy between drivers. After talking to the author a bit I started work to refactor the driver code into reusable pieces. My initial Cybook driver has been refactored itself to use the new USBMS device class. This work has also been accepted into the project. The driver still isn’t complete and with the next release will hopefully work better for Windows users. With any luck it will be fully working on all platforms very soon (currently Linux is the best supported).
I’ve learned a few things from this ongoing experience. I’ve learned about bzr and launchpad. I’ve also gotten a better understanding of Python. This experience has reaffirmed the value of open source projects in my eyes. If this was not open source I would not have bothered and written it off like the Sony Connect Software or Adobe’s Digital Editions.
The current state of the Cybook driver is, it works on Linux. Windows should work with the latest trunk. OS X support is still forth coming but I have the necessary information to get started on it. The USBMS device module is designed to make it easier to create drivers for USB mass storage devices that work on files without some sort of database. Once the Cybook is working the next steps are the Kindle and porting all other existing drivers over to the USBMS classes.