I could not resist and ordered myself a Christmas present, a Sony PRS-505 e-Book reader (it’s all Martin Pool’s fault! 
)
To use that with your own content, you need a software to convert existing e-book, HTML, PDF, and other formats to the formats that the PRS505 can understand. So I stumbled over calibre, which seems to be an awesome and complete solution for managing e-books. Of course I immediately went to package it.
The final package and Jaunty upload will still take a while, since the upstream source bundles a lot of libraries; I wrote the author about how he would prefer source changes to use the system packaged Python libraries instead, I hope I’ll get his agreement soon.
However, for those of you who already got one, or will during Christmas, here’s my own little present for you: My PPA contains preliminary, but working packages for Intrepid.
If you want to hack on the packages, I branched off the upstream trunk, loomified it to add some fixes and the packaging, and put it to Launchpad again as ubuntu branch (MOTU-owned).
Merry $END_OF_YEAR_HOLIDAYS everyone!
December 23, 2008 at 18:51 |
Thank you! I had a script that updated the latest version for my wife but your PPA should be easier.
December 23, 2008 at 19:22 |
The 505 actually reads pdf and txt natively, but that software is still awesome. Thanks for pointing it out and packaging it!
December 23, 2008 at 19:41 |
Hi… Martin…
I try to install calibre on my Intrepid 32 bit intel, and folowing the step-by-step calibra installation from http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download_ubuntu …
step 1: SUCCESS
sudo aptitude install python-setuptools python-imaging libqt4-core libqt4-gui python-qt4 python-mechanize imagemagick xdg-utils python-dbus python-lxml python-beautifulsoup help2man
step 2:SUCCESS
sudo easy_install -U calibre
step 3: FAIL and get error as following….
sudo calibre_postinstall
Trying to setup udev rules…
* Restarting Hardware abstraction layer hald [ OK ]
Setting up bash completion… failed
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/linux.py”, line 188, in setup_completion
File “build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/ebooks/lit/from_any.py”, line 15, in
File “build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/ebooks/lit/writer.py”, line 31, in
File “build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/ebooks/lit/lzx.py”, line 15, in
AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘Compressor’
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/calibre_postinstall”, line 8, in
load_entry_point(’calibre==0.4.117′, ‘console_scripts’, ‘calibre_postinstall’)()
File “build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/linux.py”, line 451, in post_install
File “build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/linux.py”, line 322, in setup_completion
UnboundLocalError: local variable ‘manifest’ referenced before assignment
Can you help me ? why I get this error ? how I can fix it ?
Please let me know on my email send4m3@yahoo.com, if you don’t mind.
thank you…
steven
December 23, 2008 at 20:04 |
Can you put it in Debian too?
December 23, 2008 at 23:23 |
It reads PDF files out of the box. If you have the original text you’re even better if you can print to a pdf with a page size if 3.5″ wide by 5.5″ tall with no margins.
I will agree that PDFs that come from most publishers, with a targe of 8.5″ x 11″ format is a bit difficult to read though.
At least my experience is that it presents those documents very well. From a practical perspective it works like a paperback page reader. For some that’s not all that important though.
Foo – go read the licence agreement that comes with the PRS505 and see. I wouldn’t recommend using it to try to run crysis.
December 24, 2008 at 4:07 |
I make installation of calibra from their website, but find an error on the last step? and I am using Intrepid … Why did it happen ?
thanks
December 24, 2008 at 15:44 |
Debian> As soon as I am happy enough with the package, I might consider it, at least into experimental. Main problem is that I do not have much time to look after bug reports in it, so if there is anyone who would want to co-maintain it, I’ll gladly appreciate.
December 25, 2008 at 1:42 |
Cool, thanks a bunch!
December 27, 2008 at 3:10 |
Thanks for the package. FYI, calibre also depends on python-qt4. I got hit with this error starting it: “ImportError: No module named PyQt4.QtCore”
December 30, 2008 at 17:19 |
[...] Got my new toy! By martinpitt Yay, I finally got my PRS-505 e-Book reader! I fed it with a couple of e-books from the Gutenberg project and its German affiliate, and [...]
January 14, 2009 at 2:55 |
I’ve been trying to use Calibre for a few days now, and for some reason I’m having a problem, it doesn’t seem to want to detect the device, aka the send to device button is greyed out, can anybody make any suggestions of how to fix it?
tia,
David
January 18, 2009 at 11:20 |
@David: Which eBook model do you use? Do you use the latest version from my PPA? Does “lshal|grep calibre” show anything?
January 28, 2009 at 5:33 |
Did you pull the package? I can’t find it in your PPA?
Kovid just doesn’t seem too interested in 64-bit versions of calibre on any platform.
Mike
January 28, 2009 at 12:23 |
Yes, I removed it from my PPA, since calibre is now in Ubuntu Jaunty (a newer version).
January 28, 2009 at 19:25 |
Do you think Jaunty is OK to use on a machine that I depend on? I suspect it would be foolhardy to move ahead now.
Meanwhile, I’ve heard from Kovid and he is helping me figure out why I can’t install his binary version on Intrepid.
Thanks,
Mike
February 16, 2009 at 16:07 |
[...] tempted pitti into buying one of these and then packaging the Calibre software for maintaining the e-Book reader. It makes an excellent interface for reading free content such as Gutenberg texts that would [...]
March 12, 2009 at 1:43 |
Was just at the Calibre website and used the binary installer with Ubuntu intrepid, worked perfectly! There have been some changes made since Jan.!!