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Linux and Unix software....

F

firewall

Platinum Member
I need suggestions for softwares which can run MobiPocket files (.PRC) and Microsoft Reader files (.LIT) on Linux and/or Unix. The only condition is that they should be free.

 
Thanks! Any other suggestions? Are there any readers for Linux/Unix which can read multiple formats... like..... a trillian for IMs...... that sort of software.
 
Those are encrypted ebook formats aren't they?

If you want to play them on Linux you'll have to find something to crack the encryption on those things... either that or find a player that works in Wine.

Unfortunately I don't know of ways to circumvent these 'protections'.. I am sure that they exist, but I don't know of anything.

Personally I avoid this sort of thing like the plague. I got burned once.. I was looking for a audio book to listen to at work while I was doing other stuff, so while looking for stuff I found some torrents for ripped audio cds people had posted.

I figured that wasn't cool so I went to Amazon (I beleive) and paid for a book download.. What a huge mistake that was... Took me hours to figure out how to crack the stupid thing just so that I could listen to it.

Now, since I am such a evil pirate, I just go down to the local library and borrow a audiobook on cdrom whenever I go on long trips or whatnot.

As far as ebooks go there are a few publishers that make unencrypted stuff. Also you can go and download quite a few books from http://www.gutenberg.org/ and whatnot. Lots of good stuff.

But paper is the way to go, realy. It's easier on the eyes and such, but that's just my personal opinion. 🙂
 
I want it for readers of fanfiction using linux. That's why it has to be free and easy to use.

Any more suggestions are welcome.
 
Originally posted by: asadasif
I want it for readers of fanfiction using linux. That's why it has to be free and easy to use.

Any more suggestions are welcome.
Click to expand...

Oh, sorry.

I thought you had a library of ebooks that you wanted to be able to use in Linux.. You want to distribute ebooks that can be read in Linux and you want some ideas for software the end users can use, right?

Unfortunately I don't know to much about ebooks. But maybe this will get you started, since nobody else is piping in.

Well I found this page. It may be a good spot to start looking... http://tuxmobil.org/ebook.html

Maybe if you get into contact with the author of this book:
http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/

The major problem your going to run into, however, is that those ebook formats you pointed out are propriatory to one company or another. They are specificly designed to be only used on certain programs that license from them and on platforms that they approve of... They don't aprove of Linux generally and there isn't, to my knowledge, any propriatory Linux apps that license the technology from those companies.

Big publishing companies are very paraniod about people copying their ebooks and using these formats they see a possible way limit it.

It's a common problem with Linux.. Having everything open source and without major restrictions is a problem with media that people want to control and limit their customer's access to. Usually it's a problem with DVDs, multimedia files and the like, but ebooks are similar.

What it comes down to is that if you want to make books aviable to the widest audiance possible your going to have to figure out a way to publish them in a non-propriatory format.

These formats are generally stuff like HTML or PDFs... There is that new 'open document format' you could probably use. If you use something like OpenOffice.org you can import most Microsoft Office formats easy enough, and then hit a button and turn it into pdf and O😵rg's HTML generator is actually quite nice.. a lot nicer then MS Office's.

I've got quite a few pdf books, and html pages are easy enough... There is even programs like 'plucker' that you can use to download simple html formatted pages and turn it into something that can be read on palm and other things like that. That works in OS X, Linux, Windows, and other stuff.

I wish I could be more helpfull...
 
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