Barns and Noble has announced and is pre-selling the new Nook second generation Simple Touch Reader (STR). Looking at the specifications the eReader PDB format is not listed as being supported. Only EPUB and PDF are listed. My concern is the fact that I still get books in the PDB format from B&N and this new Nook isn’t going to be able to read them. I sent and email to B&N’s customer service asking for clarification....
Once again this is a weeks in review instead of once. I’ve been focusing more on new features than blogging. Calibre 0.7.57 is out and is also the beta for 0.8. Adding the tweak “test_eight_code = True” will enable the 0.8 features. Get Books aka Stores For quite some time I’ve been working on integrating support for searching and connecting to third party stores to make it easier for users to find and acquire books they’re interested in....
This week saw massive improvements to TXT input. I started the week with a slew of changes and as soon as I had implemented the first of them Lee Dolsen contacted me. We’ve worked together before improving PDF input. Since then he’s done a lot of work with preprocessing of PDF and other not so clean input. TXT input now auto detects the character encoding of the file. It isn’t 100% accurate but should work for the majority of cases....
I have been taking a short break from blogging again. The pressure at work has only increased and is eating into a lot of my time. I haven’t been motivated to work on personal projects because well they are work. However, this has recently changed a bit. I’ve started a Qt based library for reading ebooks in a generic manner. It is called lebookread! It is it’s early stages. So far I have it supporting epub, palmdoc pdb, ztxt pdb, tcr, and rb files....
Most this week was spent turning PML input and output. I spent a bit of work bug tracking and enhancing FB2 output as well. The changes for PML input are as follows. Pass along the included cover as the cover when converting (also applies to eReader PDB). Allow for images to be in top level, archivename_img or images directory for PMLZ. Based on that order it will check for images and if they are not found move onto the next location....
Mostly bug fixes this week. The majority of them were centered around eReader PDB output and PML generation. eReader PDB output now marks the first image as the cover image if a cover image is not explicitly set. PMLZ got images named properly in the output. PML generation now has .png added to the end of image names. I also fixed a bug where excessive new lines were not being properly removed....
There was no week in review last week because I went on vacation this past week. So this week in review combines everything since the last week in review. I’ve made a few bug fixes to some output formats, PDB metadata and FB2 output mainly. The major things I’ve been working on is a bit of restructuring for the GUI and fixing some small bugs. The GUI has had the button in the status bar (jobs, tags, cover flow) moved to a side bar on the right hand side....
Device interfaces can now be configured in the GUI. Also, there is a simple framework for creating plugin configuration widgets. I’ve added a metadata reader for the eReader format. However, eReader supports 3 ways to set the metadata in the file. In the pdb header (only supports setting a short title). In the metadata section of the file (supports the most information: title, author, publisher, copyright, isbn). Embedded in the text as a comment....