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Calibre and the E-Book

Calibre is an Ebook Management Platform. Originally started in 2006, it has grown, with a team of dedicated developers from a small project to get content onto a reader to myriad of options.

  • Library Management – Calibre manages e-books stored in it for you, including options to sort, tag, comment, etc. Supports the downloading of metadata.
  • E-Book Conversion – Supports all major formats(full list here) including EPUB and MOBI. The conversion program supports rescaling font sizes, automatic detection/creation of chapters/table of contents, and insertion of metadata at the start of the book.
  • Syncing to E-Book Readers – Supports a list of devices it can sync to(Full list here) and automatically chooses the best format for the device.
  • News Ripper – Downloads news from websites/RSS feeds, formats it into an e-book and sends it to the device. Supports full versions of articles, not just summaries. Pre-supported sites include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc. You can create custom ‘recipes’ for other sites and use them, even upload them to share with others.
  • Built in E-Book Viewer
  • Content Server – Calibre supports acting as a web server to access your collection using a web browser. Supports email and mobile devices.

Now, this is great if you have an E-Book Reader. Let’s go back to our recent discussion of the Amazon Kindle, with Wi-Fi. Many papers are available for free online. Let’s take the Wall Street Journal, which does charge. The cost of an Amazon Subscription to the WSJ is $14.99 a month. The cost of getting the newspaper is $2.29 per week($9.16 a month) and online only at $1.99 per week(7.96 a month). Personally, while we think charging more on the Kindle is wrong, here’s a way to extract the information using your login and send it to your Kindle.

We did a little test of this feature, and picked a few of their over 200 English news sources(They have additional foreign language offerings). We were able to program it to autogenerate a few choice news sources and send them on a custom frequency to our device as long as Calibre was running in the background. Next, it seems to have a command-line interface, and we’ll have to see if it can run as a cron job on our server.

We have yet to test it, but according to the Calibre forums, the following should work…

ebook-convert <calibreroot>/resources/recipes/nytimes.recipe todays_nytimes.mobi

That should work if set up as a cron job, but e-book conversion, we gather, can be resource intensive. We’ll have more on these experiments later.

Either way, Calibre is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. Why not give it a try?

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Published on September 26, 2010
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Why You Might Finally Give in and Buy a Kindle

booting up the Kindle 3
Image by The Shifted Librarian via Flickr

It is time to revisit the pros and cons of the Kindle, which has finally plummeted into the land of reasonable pricing. Let’s go back to some of the reasons we quoted for buying and not buying a Kindle last year, and update it a bit.

Reasons to Buy a Kindle

  • It’s Great For Travel
  • You can email files to your Kindle address. With the new Wi-Fi option, you can do so for free. Over 3G it costs a few cents. But you can set a threshold to avoid overcharging
  • It looks great. Especially in graphite. The screen is much more conducive to long periods of reading than a conventional LCD screen. They’ve really improved the contrast. It is still in greyscale, but this is for reading. You want color, go to your computer.
  • Almost any book is available. And publishers and content owners can pull out old and out of print books and sell them on the Kindle as there is only a small cost to start out. Crunchgear reports the U.S. Kindle store has over 700,000 books. Barnes and Noble claims more, but includes public domain books in its tally, something Amazon apparently does not.
  • It is the future. Paper books won’t die, we don’t want them to.
  • You can switch seamlessly between your Kindle and reading the book on your computer, smartphone, etc. as Amazon has released Kindle apps for most major platforms.
  • Amazon is a large, stable company and the likelihood of them discontinuing the Kindle and taking your e-books with them is probably slim.

Reasons Not to Buy a Kindle

  • Books…old ones at least, can be cheaper.
  • There is still a value to the printed book
  • No expansion slot, but the new one has 4GB of memory, which is an estimated 3,500 books.
  • It must be charged. Your paper book never needs any batteries. Admittedly, advertised battery life is measured in weeks, not hours like most devices.
  • You are locked into the Kindle format. Your property is licensed, not owned, and you cannot move it to other platforms.
  • It doesn’t support EPUB format, which means you’d have to convert any book delivered in that format.
  • It doesn’t support lending, which the Nook limitedly does.
  • You can read periodicals for free online, why do they make you pay to subscribe to a blog?

Just remember, when we started advising against the cost of an e-book reader, it cost about four hundred dollars. For that price you could buy a computer. Now, at $139 for the wi-fi only version that we bought, or $50 more for adding 3G, it is at a price point that makes it more realistic. We’d like to see sub-$100 pricing soon, at least on the wi-fi version. The Kindle has estimated sales of about 5 million since it launched in 2007. The latest one is so popular it keeps getting sold out. The Nook, by comparison, has sold 1 million since it launched last year.

Books are are an over twenty billion a year business. About eight percent of U.S. readers use an e-book reader and in a recent poll, twelve percent of Americans said they are likely to get one within the next six months. Of course, the same poll indicated that e-reader purchasers were more likely to read(not a big surprise) and that the majority of them read more now than they did six months ago.

“”Customers tell us they love the freedom and flexibility of our Buy Once, Read Everywhere approach because they always have their full reading library at their fingertips and never lose their place in a book-whether they are reading on a Kindle or one of their other favorite devices,” said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle, in a recent press release announcing an update to Kindle for Android. The idea is this. If your platform is locked down, but you can get it on any device, is that not the type of DRM you can live with? The biggest complaint about DRM is the lack of portability. We’d like to see things more open, but given the choice between DRM content and no content at all…

In the music business, choosing between DRM-music and buying a CD kept us with CDs, which could be turned into DRM free music. We’ll see what happens. For the Kindle, the issue of library lending has to be handled. the revenue from selling licenses and services to libraries can be a wonderful one if they unveil a system to do so. Why should Overdrive Media Console and Adobe Digital Editions have this market?

To go back to the issue of EPUB and loading your own stuff onto it…you can load PDF files onto it. And if you don’t want to hook up via USB, you can email it to username@free.kindle.com to get it over Wireless. username@kindle.com to be charged for over 3G. And programs like Calibre, which we will get into in another post, can be set up to not only convert e-books from Google and Project Gutenberg, but support Kindle profiles and assemble news sources into an e-book format and autotransfer it to the Kindle every day, so you do not get charged(which you will if you subscribe to same through Amazon).

There is one final thing we have to get to. Many of us, including our editor, are Android phone users. Reading books on a 3-4 inch phone screen is doable, but it is small and can hurt one’s eyes. so, while it is doable for short periods, there is still a market for a device more conducive to reading.

And even with the larger LCD screen, the iPad hasn’t killed the Kindle yet, has it?

What do you think?

Published on September 26, 2010
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LED Bulbs Coming into their Own?

100-240V 2W (15W equivalent) E27 Osram LED Lig...
Image via Wikipedia

We bought our first LED light bulb a few months ago and put it into our desk lamp. The suspicious yet understandable issue with LED lightbulbs is lumens.

We aren’t used to lumens. We’re used to watts. Even though they aren’t accurate. CFL lightbulbs are labeled with lumens, which indicate light output, but they also note the equivalent in a traditional incandescent bulb because that is what we understand. Those notes are suspiciously missing from the LED packaging we see.

Even CNET’s Green Tech, and its editor, Martin LaMonica agrees with us.  But, he advises that is changing. He tried some samples from Lighting Science Group, which manufactures many of the LED bulbs for Home Depot‘s Ecosmart line. The bulbs are available on the Home Depot website, and should be in stores sometime this month.

But these bulbs which are getting brighter and more capable of what we demand of them are not cheap. Twenty to thirty-five dollars for a single light bulb is a bit much. The savings over time are a consideration, but the price will have to drop before it becomes a mainstream option.

The Department of Energy is set to unveil a program to help shoppers understand these new options. They will have a new label called Lighting Facts. It certainly will help if all bulbs use the same designations. We guess it is time to internalize the lumens system.

In the meantime, we have added some Sylvania ACCENT LED bulbs to a bathroom. Three produce enough to shine in this small room. But we knew that going in that they weren’t incredibly bright. We compared the lumens to the package of CFLs next to them at the store.

The concern is that the information isn’t getting to us. The New York Times reports that the Federal Trade Commission is suing Lights of America for misrepresenting the light output and life expectancy of their LED lightbulbs. For example, the company claimed one of its bulbs could replace a 40-watt incandescent, which typically puts out 400 lumens. They found the bulb in question only produced 74 lumens. In addition, they claimed another bulb would last 30,000 hours, but lost 80% of its light output after only 1,000 hours.

The company responded by stating that the bulbs that are the focus of the suit were introduced before formal standards were established for LED’s. Furthermore, they advise that they already responded by removing the equivalency claims from its packaging…which explains why the useful comparison of equivalency is omitted from LED packaging.

In the end, we’ll continue to experiment with these bulbs. Why? Because they last longer, use less electricity, and like the CFLs of a few years ago, will continue to improve. Why? Because the government and the public demands it.

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Published on September 15, 2010
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Hauppauge and Silicondust Announce Alliance for HTPC CableCard Tuners

Silicondust USA Inc., maker of the popular HDHomerun networked digital TV tuner, and Hauppauge Computer Works, known for a variety of hardware tuners, have announced an alliance to introduce a USB-connected digital cablecard tuner.

Silicondust will concurrently be introducing its HDHomerun Prime, a cablecard version of their networked digital tuner. “Silicondust’s experience with digital cable access systems combined with Hauppauge’s strong computer TV tuner sales will produce a successful launch of this innovative product.” said Ken Plotkin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Hauppauge Computer Works.

The products should be available for sale by the end of the year. The competition, the PCI-Express based Ceton InfiniTV4 Cablecard Tuner, has suffered from parts shortages.

As previously mentioned, a recent change by Cable Labs has permitted these devices to be used in a limited fashion under Linux. As revealed by Jeremy Hammer, Vice President of Systems Integration for Ceton Corporation, during a recent podcast interview, developers are already working, with support from the hardware manufacturers, to integrate the necessary functionality into popular Linux DVR software MythTV. You can hear that interview on the HTPCentric Podcast, Episode 7(htpcentric.thedigitalmediazone.com).

The editor of this blog appeared in Episode 3 of the same podcast, discussing his MythTV setup. An update on that will be coming soon.

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Published on September 12, 2010
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Diaspora Set to Reveal Open Source Project

Diaspora, billed as an open alternative to Facebook, has announced that it will be open-sourced on September 15th.

Diaspora was started as a project by four NYU students, proposing to build an open-source, distributed alternative to Facebook. Diaspora raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter, especially impressive considering they had only set a goal of $10,000.

On September 15th, they will put out a developer release, open their source code repository, publish a roadmap, and shift to a more community-oriented development style. Two of the members of the original team are taking a leave from their studies at NYU to run the project.

There are already some open social media projects out there, most notably, statusnet, a micro-blogging server that provides functionality similar to Twitter, on which the popular site, identi.ca is based. However, while identi.ca has been embraced by the tech community, it has not yet seen widespread adoption. Diaspora may face the same hurdles in stealing market share from Facebook, which has over 500 million active users.

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Published on August 31, 2010
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Leo Laporte Learns the Value of Federation

Early this morning, famous podcasting personality Leo Laporte, Head TWIT over at the TWIT Network, posted on his Leoville blog a post titled Buzz Kill. Laporte had switched his microblogging over to the underappreciated Google Buzz, which he used to update Twitter. However, he discovered today, August 22nd, that none of his Buzz posts had been public since August 8th. As he puts it,

“Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson. No one noticed. Not even me. …But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place. I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs.”

You can read the full text at his blog here, but it does emphasize the thought processes we’ve been exploring as we learn about the federated social web. We have had some conversations with Evan Prodromou of Statusnet, among other people, as we try to understand this, and he was kind enough to send along some recommended reading since the last time we blogged about this.

We should own our own brand, and build its value at a site controlled by us. If you have an email address at a domain you control, you may have someone hosting it, but you can move it whenever you like. You have control. If you have your identity, and our email addresses and social media are part of the identity we build online, then the content is in your hands. Social media becomes a means of distribution, rather than a destination.

That is where the federated social web concept comes in. In a federated system, there are distinct entities that control parts of the system, but those parts are connected with agreed-upon rules to make a pleasing and usable whole. The World Wide Web is such a system. Email is such a system.

Statusnet instances aren’t for everyone, admittedly. Ours hasn’t attracted as many connections as Twitter, but gives us access to a different crowd. But what about blogging? Let’s take Gadget Wisdom.

  1. We write a blog entry.
  2. Our RSS feed updates. We use Feedburner to assist with that, but that isn’t required.
  3. We tweet the post to our Twitter account and dent it to our statusnet instance, so people know what we’re talking about. We still own the conversation.
  4. Our site draws in anyone talking about our tweet as comments on the post, thus bringing the discussion back to the blog.

Everything comes back to us. We are integrating social media into our site, not going out and relying on it exclusively. It is part of the reason that we don’t participate in Facebook but we do in Twitter. Twitter and similar microblogging paradigms works as a news delivery system, and can even be an alternative for RSS. Facebook has its status updates as well, but it is part of a bigger system that sees to tie everything together. We prefer to do that ourselves.

In case you didn’t get what we are saying…microblogging, social media, and sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, Google Buzz, etc should be a content delivery and enrichment system, not a content creation system. Now, we disagree with Leo that they are “an immense waste of time.” We just believe that he should change his approach to social media. Let’s all bring our identities under our control.

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Published on August 22, 2010
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SSD Prices Predicted to Drop below $1 per GB

Tested reports that, according to iSuppli Market Research, storage prices for Solid State Drives will fall below $1 per gigabyte by the end of this year. That would still be at least ten times the cost of a traditional hard disk drive. This might stimulate OEM sales, at least, and encourage manufacturers to start mainstreaming the technology.

The biggest advantage of a solid state drive, in our opinion, right now is as an operating system/program partition. We’ve added SSDs in most of our systems as OS drives, including our server. It allows us to spin down the traditional drives where we store our media. It, coupled with advances in boot technology on Linux, continues to speed up our boot experience.

Currently, a lot of our computers go down when not in use, and we’re trying to design more to do this. We’re down to only two systems running 24/7, and hoping to get that to one this year.

But, our own desires aside, if the price is competitive, we could see mainstream adoption of SSDs. They have no moving parts, are fast, which is a great advantage. They have longevity issues, but with some software wear-leveling techniques, and a three-year warranty(standard for HDDs as well), there shouldn’t be a barrier to using them. The technology continues to move forward and improve.

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Published on August 22, 2010
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Intel to buy McAfee

SAN FRANCISCO - SEPTEMBER 22: Intel CEO Paul ...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Intel, best known for its chip manufacturing, announced it is buying computer security software company McAfee for $7.68 billion.

Intel commented that today’s security approach is inadequate for current market, with the growing availability of Internet connections on phones and other devices. The industry, they state, needs a solution that combines software, hardware, and services.

“In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences,” said Intel CEO Paul Otellini.

Both boards of directors have unanimously approved the deal. The deal still requires McAfee shareholder approval and regulatory clearance.

Published on August 19, 2010
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Some CableCard Content Will Be Available to Linux

CableLabs, the independent consortium of cable operators which creates specifications for cable television compatible products has approved two measures that will permit Home Theater PCs running Linux to take advantage of some U.S. cable television content.

Cable providers can set copy control information for their content to specify how the content can be duplicated, setting it to Copy Once, Copy Never, or Copy Freely. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, specified that all broadcast television channels must be set as Copy Freely. Non-premium subscription programming has to be set to at least Copy Once, but of course can be set to Copy Freely. This is where cable providers vary, as some tend to set all programs as Copy Once and others tend to set all programs as Copy Freely.

CableLabs has approved the passing of content coded as Copy Free without Digital Rights Management, or DRM. DRM allows a content provider to restrict what you can do with content once downloaded or recorded. No current Linux based software has licensed or been approved to carry content with DRM, and the decision by CableLabs means that users of MythTV, will be able to decrypt and record some content. CableLabs is charged with approving all CableCard compatible devices.

A CableCard is a PCMCIA card which a carrier is legally obligated to offer on request, which can be added to a tuner to decrypt content. However, until recently, PC CableCard peripherals were extremely limited. Two manufacturers have worked hard to open up the PC market to this hardware and have advocated for Linux support. Ceton, just recently launched its InfiniTV4 PCI-Express card, and Silicondust, creators of the popular and Linux compatible HDHomerun networked digital tuner are set to release a cablecard enabled version later this year.  Jeremy Hammer, VP of Systems integration for Ceton, and a Fedora user, advised that the Ceton product will fully support Linux and MythTV to the extent they are able.

Unfortunately for us, our service provider, Time Warner Cable, sets nearly everything to Copy Once, this rendering the device pretty much useless unless they change their ways. Comcast, however, apparently is much more open(surprising, isn’t it?), setting most of its non-premium content to Copy Freely. Being as you need to rent the cable card from the cable company anyway, we do not see the point of restricted content they know you’ve paid for.

However, we’ve never quite gotten the point of DRM in general. It more often restricts legitimate usage over actually stopping piracy. And as we’ve been reminded recently, fair use for recorded content is not to keep it on your hard drive forever. If you really like something enough to keep, you probably should buy it. You’ll get a better quality version…and if you’re lucky…extras.

Published on August 16, 2010
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Fun with SIP, Android, and Free Dial-In Numbers

Sipdroid 1.0.7 on a HTC Hero mobile phone
Image via Wikipedia

SIPDroid is a free VOIP client for Android that uses the standard SIP protocol. The VOIP calls will go over the data connection, be it 3G or Wi-Fi, and thus not affect your minute count.

According to their FAQ, it “uses G.711 A-law to transmit voice which needs about 80 kBit/s in each direction. This corresponds to a total of 1.2 MB per minute. A video call needs approximately twice as much. When optionally enabled for all calls Sipdroid uses GSM codec to compress to about 30 kBit/s in each direction resulting in a total of 0.5 MB per minute.”

You can use a + in a phone number in order to indicate to the Android device to use the secondary as opposed to the primary choice. You can set either the phone or SIPDroid to be the primary method of dialing. Emergency calls will always go out over the phone line.

SIPDroid prefers you set up a free or paid account at PBXes. This allows you to have all the advantages of a PBX and is already set up for connecting calls anonymously to Skype and GTalk. You can, if you use them, set a feature that will, if the data reception is bad enough, transfer the call to the phone’s cell number. You need to set up a gateway to the traditional telephone network(PSTN) from the PBX for this to work, however.

For services like dialing onto the regular phone network, you do have to pay money. But not to SIPDroid. To a VOIP provider(more on that at some point). PBXes also offers a paid account with additional features, such as a better voice codec and support for more lines.

If you don’t want to go out on the traditional telephone network, you can use the five extensions offered in the free version to talk to other people logged in(only 2 simultaneous conversations at a time, however).

Since we didn’t want to pay any money for a test, we opted to sign up for a free number with IPKall. They offer dial-in only numbers in the 206, 253, 360, and 425 area codes that will auto-forward to a SIP account you designate. We had some issues as we tried routing a call from them to PBXes and then to a phone on a wi-fi connection logged into the PBXes server. A few times it didn’t seem to connect, and when it did, there was some lag. But it was free and when it worked, it was clear. We also experimented with SIPGate, which offers a free dial-in phone number as well.

We could see a lot of potential uses for this technology. VoIp is nothing new. We’ve played with it before. But, think of the possibilities. A little private network your phone can always be connected to that will alow you to communicate airtime free? Let’s go a step further. We know of someone who lived on a college campus with good wi-fi coverage and considered having an iPod Touch and Skype or such instead of a phone.

As public wi-fi and open wi-fi becomes more available, and with fewer people calling and more people using data…we could imagine a future where people opt for a data only connection and the occasional SIP call. The possibilities are endless.

And we’ll have more on playing with SIP later.

Published on July 25, 2010
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