But for some the stumbling block comes when you’re trying to sync such a device with one or various operating systems. This can be a problem for anyone who uses anything but Windows. Fortunately where there is a demand, there is a supply. For those who have a Sony Reader you’re in luck. Thanks to one Kovid Goyal there is a wonderful interface to allow you to manage a book collection (including news feeds) for your Sony Reader. This interface is called Calibre. This tool can sync ebooks to the main memory of your device or to a memory card with ease. Calibre works in Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Calibre is supported in the following distributions:

• Ubuntu
• Exherbo
• Debian
• Foresight

I did get Calibre installed on Elive+Compiz without any problems. The only thing you need to make sure you have is xdg-utils installed before you issue the binary installation command. Once you have xdg-utils installed issue the following command:
sudo python -c "import urllib2; exec urllib2.urlopen('http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download_linux_binary_installer').read(); main()"
This installation take a bit because it has to download the source. The good news is you do not have to intervene during the installation.

Main Window

Once the installation is complete you can run the software with the command calibre.

As you can see (in the image to the left) the user interface is very intuative. From this window you can manage books, edit meta information, manage news feeds, sync to your device, save to disk, and more.

But how do you add a book? Simple. Say you want to download and install Dracula by Bram Stoker. You can get this book for free from free-eBooks.net. Once you have the title downloaded you will want to click the Add Books button, navigate to where you have the book downloaded, select the book, and click Open.

Once the book has been added you will see it listed in the main window. You might have to adjust the details of the book. This will depend upon who did the original conversion of the book and if they entered the meta data correctly. Editing this data is simple: Highlight the book and click the Edit Meta Information button.

Adding News Feeds

Adding Newsfeed

Of course you will want to have your gHacks RSS feeds with you as you travel. To add a feed click on the drop-down arrow to the right of the Fetch News button and select Add A Custom News Source. The image to the right shows all of the information needed for adding a news feed. You can even set it up to auto-update feeds. Pretty slick.

Once you are satisfied with your library you can send your books and news to your device. To do this plug in your device and, once it is recognized, click the Send To Device button.

If you press the drop down to the right of the Send To Device button you can select to send your books to your device and then delete them from your local library, send the books to the devices main memory, send the books to the devices memory card, or send only specific formats to the device.

Final Thoughts

It’s about time someone wrote a reliable interface for ebook readers that is reliable, simple to use, and (best of all) cross platform. Now those of you using the Linux operating system do not have to wait around to purchase that Sony Reader!

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Feedbooks is providing a similar service. The only difference is that they -only- convert the RSS Feed of a website into a pdf document that can be downloaded without costs from their website. The whole process is as simple as it can get, paste a feed into the form, hit submit and download the pdf document at the end.

Feedbook provides A4 pdf downloads, Cybook & Sony Reader, iLiad (whatever that is) and custom documents. I was not able to explore the custom option further because one has to signup to create those.

Feedbooks provides a button that webmasters can embed on their website. I have not tried it yet but I guess it would be possible to use one of the many feed combination services to combine many feeds into one and paste that url into Feedbooks to create a huge pdf document from multiple feeds.

Feedbooks offers more than just this RSS to PDF service. Users can download e-books as well that can be sorted in various ways. I encountered some error messages from time to time when I tried to convert some feeds.

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The .lit file extension stands for literature and it seems to be rather common on Windows Mobile devices. Since I never have owned one it was completely unknown to me. Microsoft Reader is an old program, last updated in 2005, that is available for several languages and operating systems.

The PC version comes with an optional Text to Speech module which reads the texts out loud if so desired. It is possible to convert .lit files to open standard files by using a program called Convert Lit which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

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That’s what the Book Beta Demo is trying to present. It looks pretty much like a book on a website. Readers can flip through the pages of the book, go to a specific page and even tear pages from it. Advanced features that you wont find in any real book are demonstrated as well.

Those features include transparency effects as well as a component called live Bitmapping which makes it possible to change animations on a page.

I’m not saying that this is a perfect adaption but the demonstration does come closer to the real experience than those pdf documents. I had some troubles concentrating on the contents of the book because my eyes did seem to be attracted to the page flipping mechanism.

The reason could be because it is a new way of reading or because there was not much content to read anyway in this demonstration.

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The software eBook to Images supports all the eBook formats mentioned above and can be greatly customized to fit the exact screen size and display of your mp3 player. The options are manifold and will please every single user. The exact screen width, heights and image format can be selected so that every image fits perfectly on the screen of the mp3 player.

The advanced options are incredible. The font size and type can be changed to increase or decrease the font size. The text and background color can be defined and the images can be rotated 90° or 270° to fit on every mp3 player perfectly. Page numbers can be added to each image and colors can be inversed if needed.

It is furthermore possible to add a custom background picture and select the amount of pictures of each folder. The default is 100 pictures per folder.

Creating image files of an eBook was astonishingly fast. A conversion of a 2 Megabyte public eBook was completed in under a minute although I selected a different font, font size and colors. Oh, that 2 Megabyte PDF file converted to images with a total size of roughly 84 Megabytes.
via JK on the run

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I originally stumbled on to this story on Lifehacker and found it worth your time because it eliminates the need to carry one more thing on the tram, metro or bus. Since I really despise carrying more than 0 things in my hands while on the go, this is something that will really come in handy for me.

The software behind the show, eBook to images is a freeware windows apps, and you guessed it, it converts eBook pages into pictures, so you can view them on you iPod. The beauty of it is that you can use it with any handheld device that supports picture browsing, those of you with iPod touch or iPhones will be scrolling along the pages with pleasure in no time.

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