Low Calibre

[seryn]

I have a stupid question about Calibre.

Setting aside the fact that it seems incredibly unstable since it incremented versions twice since I got my first install done like last week.

Setting aside the stuff I didn't know it did, like aggregate news feeds (and um, why? doesn't everyone already have something else that's doing that, and better?)

What is this going to do for me? Ok, sure, I can see that if I run all my k-books through it, I won't have to worry about Amazon coming and taking them away [they're coming to take me away, ha ha]. But eh, most of this stuff I don't care if they took it all back and Amazon did apologize profusely for the problem when it happened. Now they send an email asking if you want an updated copy of something. (Which was a real pain because you have to be able to reply from exactly the address which received the mail and we'd been forwarding copies around.)

But as far as I can tell there's no convenient way to port a fanfic to my Kindle. Sure if it's complete and from Petulant Poetess, I can pick "print whole story" and save that HTML file which would probably not suck to convert. But then I have to port it to the Kindle either via the cord or by emailing it from an approved address. I guess now that Amazon has that cloud shit, I could upload it there but I don't think my Kindle speaks cloud yet. I'll check. Certainly that would have been a worthy Calibre update if it works--- although considering I don't want to give Calibre my email password, it would have to upload just using the regular browser-owned login cookies because I'm surely not giving Calibre my Amazon password.

But corrvin rec'd a gigantic ffn fic (which was LM/HG and mostly non-suck as long as you didn't think too hard). It was 96 chapters. And you know how much dreck fanfiction.net adds to their content framing. I would have much rather read that lying on my bed, via Kindle. But there isn't an obvious way to grab all chapters of a fic, strip out the crud, then convert to mobi, then download to the Kindle.

So... I'm thinking this Calibre stuff isn't going to help me much. I guess if I bought content elsewhere, then I could go through all those machinations in order to get that content onto my Kindle. It seems pretty unlikely that somewhere else would have a price so much better that it would be worth 20 minutes of my time compared to just buying it from Amazon.

But I do read a LOT of fic and I would like to be able to read it somewhere other than at my desk.

I guess Calibre might be useful, but the program is worried about fetching news feeds instead of having something like wget. Stupid people not solving problems only I have.

Comments

[pj]

It's almost like reading a foreign language for me .....

[seryn]

Sorry.

I read a lot of fanfiction (almost exclusively Harry Potter... because there's enough of it that I can be picky about what I read and I actively dislike the slash fics. (Which I think is named because no one used to specify when a story was male/female or M/F, but always did so when it was M/M, or F/F.) Even something like the Iron Man fandom is chock full of slash.)

Kindles work magically with Amazon. Kind of like an iPod with iTunes. And both of those services make things magically work by locking down the content.

Calibre is software that strips DRM from e-books, manages your library of e-books (centralizing, which is useful since every service wants to save to its own directory; fancy windows-y visual organization too, not just a list of filenames.) So by running books you've bought for your Kindle through Amazon through Calibre, you would have a copy that Amazon could not take back for whatever reason. (And there are people who will never trust Amazon after the fiasco they had several years ago that affected like 6 people.)

wget is a program that will fetch all webpages connected to the current one. There's some handwaving in that explanation and it's non-trivial to set up and use.

So when I get a rec for a fanfic that's 100 chapters, and I want to read it on my Kindle... currently I would have to grab every single chapter and click "save as", then I would have to manually concatenate those files, then I would have to massage that to make sure nothing was broken, then I would have to convert the format (Calibre does also do this.), then I would have to plug my Kindle into my computer and drag the file over by hand. (I can, I discovered, email a file to myself and have it pulled onto my Kindle via wifi, but it's not any less awkward.)

What I want is: "See, this here? On my big computer screen? I want to read this and all the rest of the chapters, on my Kindle, in bed, by some magically easy process."

Everyone says I need Calibre to do this, but I wasn't impressed since it doesn't include any tools to wget.

[pj]

Hhhmmm ... I guess you are going to have to create your own open source program? Is Calibre open source?

[seryn]

Calibre is GPL, so yes, the source code is available.

However:
There are people in this world who will not redo a knitting pattern to use a different yarn because there is a lot of math involved. There aren't enough gods in the universe for these people to pray to if they have big tits either because almost no patterns exist that will magically fit a well-endowed chest even if you use exactly the name-brand yarn specified. That means those women need to redo topological mapping of a 3-D object onto a 2-D surface while changing the size of the average "brick" making up the "wall" simultaneously.

These people stop at scarves or quit knitting entirely because Lands End sells sweaters that fit everybody for $20-50 and the amount of effort in just the math overwhelms.

I am not a programmer. I want my magic canned solution that will solve my problem. But there isn't a LandsEnd catalog entry with what I need in just my size and I'm so far out of the ambiently weird clique now that I don't even have friends I can bribe with cookies.

But I'm sorry I posted something that made you confused. I explained this to Simon as, "pj was all like, "I understood 'Gor' and 'Let's'." " Which is from one of my favorite cartoons ever, Captain Simian And The Space Monkeys. In one episode a super genius character starts out this huge technical explanation of a project with, "Gor, Let's ...." and the dim character, Gor, says, after waiting patiently through this huge ramble, "I understood 'Gor' and 'Let's'." It just seems like the kind of thing that would be so extremely useful if it had made it into the the "common culture" so I could expect everyone to understand the reference.

[pj]

"Gor, Let's ....." HAHAHAHA. It wasn't quite that bad, but since I do not have an ereader (as I keep telling myself I do not need one more techie toy and my eyes thank me for it) the eyes do glaze over a bit.

Do you know elf? She may have an answer for a program that sorts, translates to a different format and imports without wanting to stick needles in your eyes.

[seryn]

There were a lot of reasons for buying one and individually they would not have pushed me into it. The new version and the price drop on the Kindle last year. Simon's mother needing a good gift for her winter holiday, Christmas, but not being technically savvy enough that I could buy her something I hadn't personally used and could not debug remotely--- and that was a good idea since it's probably too hard for her. The amount of on-screen reading I do already and wanting that to be portable (ha!, we can say ha! very loudly right now). Plus I had a large collection of books I'd grabbed for free to read on the Kindle-for-PC software and when it reached 200, I realized I had enough not to need to buy books...

I didn't really like it in the beginning. If you don't have a compelling reason, I think they're still awkward enough not to be worth the money. However, I did end up loving the ability to have hundreds of reading choices in my bag wherever I go and I really appreciate the privacy at the gym. Reading on a Kindle... people shrug and leave you alone. Reading an actual book and 3-8 people will ask me what I'm reading.

Considering what I'm looking for at the gym is something light and easy to consume, this is usually embarrassing. I know I shouldn't be embarrassed because the plastic woman next to me is "reading" an off-brand Cosmo, so anything that has actual text is several grade levels above her selection, but I usually am embarrassed to be reading shapeshifter romances in public.

And what I mean about the common culture thing is there really could use to be a well-understood phrase indicating that something went over one's head through no fault of one's own while not ascribing blame to the person whose discussion overshot the audience.

I did find a tool that claims to do what I want. It was incredibly hard to search for due to the inclusion of all fanfic stories as unintended positive results to the search criteria (Google kept "helping" me.) Now I just need to double-check whether the source is a safe one. I have enough going on that I do not need to inject my computer with a virus.

I looked and I don't think I know that Elf. My last interaction with someone using that moniker was quite positive though, but I don't think that's how that works.

[pj]

Wouldn't I be better off just getting an iPad so I wouldn't have the issues you are having? And a bigger screen for my poor eyes. *grin*

There is only one "elf" here on DW, so if it was here, it was her. She knows a ton about ereaders and such.

As for helpful Google searches ~ you should use the advanced search option with the "exclude this" option?

[seryn]

I don't like the iPad because you have to have a data contract for it. And any content that comes through the iTunes service is likely to be non-free. It's got crap battery life too.

So, the device costs 5 times as much, there is a monthly fee to own the device of $50-100 or so, and free content would be just as hard to import (and potentially impossible, depending on whether there "is an app for that" that's already garnered Apple's approval.)

I paid $189 for my Kindle. It has no monthly charges and runs on 3G (like most cell phones still do). The web browsing on it is seriously non-robust, but free internet anywhere you take it, for the life of the device? The batteries last up to 2.5 weeks without using the internet features. I charge it once a week or so for 15-20 minutes.

But it depends on what you want. If you want a device so you can read e-books in bed, the iPad is probably not the best choice. It doesn't have e-ink screen, so it's going to be harder on the eyes. If you're looking to be able to read email and browse the web or be playing games on the bus, then yeah, that's what you want.

I like reading on the Kindle. I find the screen to be close enough to paper that my eyes don't get tired.

[pj]

Aahhhh. I see the advantage to a Kindle. Or Sony eReader over an iPad. My laptop is portable enough that I don't need an ipad. And my Droid X takes the internet with me wherever I go. I can read books on it, but tiny screen so blah. lol

You should ask elf if she knows of any programs for what you're looking for ir if what you've found is the best there is right now. She's all into document scanning and conversation and ereaders and ebooks and stuff.

[pj]

And here is the ebook comm elf manages: http://ebooks.dreamwidth.org/

ETA - she is into fanfic, too.

[seryn]

I joined that group this morning. I'd seen it on the group-promo but not since I'd bought my Kindle.

I might ask what other people in the group are doing with my problem, but I need a bit more time to read past entries so I don't look like a moronic twit asking the same question everyone asks.

[thistleingrey]

I like Calibre quite a bit, don't bother updating it except for when I need better PDF handling for something specific, and have never tried to make .mobi with it. Dunno. It makes fairly decent .epub, but that's not what you want. Part of the problem is that Amazon does not really want you to add in stuff from elsewhere, of course.

[seryn]

Of course.

I just wasn't really impressed with Calibre. Seems like it's got a lot of functionality that doesn't solve a problem I'm actually having and nothing help me do what I want to do. I don't have a need to convert file formats except for porting onto the Kindle, which Calibre supposedly does. But converting the file is only done about 10% of the total work involved.

I did find
http://www.downloadtyphoon.com/fanfiction-downloader/infouddgolgg

Which might help with the collection of content. It seems to only support sites that do not require authentication though. Have to vet the source of that software first too.

There's a mac utility out, "DownloadStory" and some Greasemonkey scripts too. But it's hard to search for information on this because all the keywords match a bazillion fanfics once Google's done suggesting what I might have meant.

Friend of a friend spoonfed me the wget commandline to grab all chapters from ffn and concatenate them into one file. Haven't tested it, nor do I have wget for Windows installed. It wouldn't auth for any other sites either. No clue how much dreck would be merged into the big file, so a lot of testing and massaging of data would likely be required.

It seems like I have an obvious problem. It seems like the solution would be easy. And in fact the solution is either non-existent, difficult to find, or only partially functional.

The only thing that angered me enough to complain is how many people told me I needed Calibre. They were wrong. Sure it would let me make mobi files, but there's no need to have a tool to convert content I can't cleanly get.

[thistleingrey]

hmm. I've used something called fanfictiondownloader, perhaps, which can make RTF; with OpenOffice / LibreOffice one can generate PDF, which Kindle is supposed to inhale. Will check actual name in the morning (posting this from phone).

[thistleingrey]

It's this: http://www.fanfictiondownloader.net/

[seryn]

Yup. Same place. Thanks. And it wasn't "brought to you by the network version of a fourth-world whorehouse, chock full of malware, viruses, and incurable computer diseases"?

[thistleingrey]

The version I downloaded a while ago--not the current one, which handles .mobi, I see--was clean.

[seryn]

Calibre is GPL, so the source code is available, yes.

The only thing Calibre does that would be useful in porting content is convert file types. It will take an HTML file and convert it into pretty much any of the formats used by any of the e-readers.

Everyone told me I needed Calibre to manage my e-book library. But I can't figure out why. I've been reading tech blogs that talk about how to get Calibre to talk to your cloud storage (they favor DropBox), and obviously there are tools out there which will grab content (even if I don't have that part straightened out yet). But using Calibre in particular does not solve my problem, despite the implication that it would by everyone telling me that I needed Calibre.

I have a problem. I mention this problem. People tell me I need Calibre. Calibre doesn't solve the problem at all. It has almost nothing to do with my problem. Calibre solves a similar problem that most technologically savvy people would not have (fetching news feeds), so it could have done what I needed and demonstrably chose not to. But the way it solves this trivial problem for other people is cumbersome and almost useless. Making me wonder what, exactly, is the point. And moreover, why do people recommend this useless piece of shit when it does not do anything.