eBooks on Devices.

I'd forgotten, for quite some time, to install Calibre on my new PC when it arrived last year, so when I was finally reminded of my omission, I got right on with that task. Last week!

I copied my library of ebooks from the old PC (sitting forlornly in the corner pretending to be a server), and started to populate Calibre. I do have quite a hefty ebook library - a quick glance at my Fictionwise bookshelf alone, reveals a total of 197 books! I have a lesser quantity that I've actually scanned, recognised and converted, but I think we're talking maybe half a dozen, if that.

Scanning is a pain, unless you have one of these! Recognition is also a pain, especially in older books, because the quality of print is not always perfect, and for some reason certain letters always seem to be interpreted in the same way - m often comes out as rn. It's especially difficult when the text is printed with serif characters (and let's face it, most old books are), so the results are littered with errors requiring correction. Yeah, scanning your own books in is tricky.

I've often wondered if speech recognition would be a viable option, but I always feel like a bit of a twit saying "Open quotes what's wrong comma close quotes he asked" - you can get Dragon, for example, to type exactly what you're saying, as long as you say it correctly. I've never actually had it type comma when I've asked for a comma, but since I lost my copy of Dragon Dictate quite some time ago, this isn't something I've tried since I discovered ebooks.

But I digress! Of course I do - it's my thing. A bit like those jokes Ronnie Corbett used to tell on The Two Ronnies show. As I child I hated that part of the show, because I wanted a quick joke, and it was always a 5 minute lead up to the joke, by which time my childish attention span had wondered. In retrospect, and having seen some of them since, they were actually rather funny!

Ooops!

On to the main point (which is, I have to say, nothing like as exciting and funny as the lead up would have you believe). I discovered that Calibre has a built in content server. "What?" I hear you say, "What's that?"

Actually, Content Server has got to be one of the more transparent terms across which I've come recently - it's a server which will allow access to content. In this case the content being ebooks.

If I turn on the content server, I can access my Calibre library from any machine on my network, as long as I know the IP address of my main PC. If you type in the address 192.168.1.2:8080 then, assuming your PC has the IP 192.168.1.2 and Calibre's content server is running there, you can get at your Calibre library from any PC/laptop/device/ebook reader which can connect to your network. Any. And it does work, because I tried it from ALL of them!

I tried from the eeePad, and was able to download a book to the device. As it happened, this particular book appears to be formatted without any kind of paragraph formatting (there don't seem to be any carriage returns in the entire book!), but that's an individual book issue.

I even tried on the Kindle I'd borrowed from school (I wanted to see if I was happy with an e-ink device), and because there's a browser, I was able to access the library. At first the Kindle didn't want to download the book, because I'd asked for the ePub version, but Calibre happily converted the book to Mobi format (apparently readable by Kindles), and the Kindle not only downloaded, but I'm already a couple of pages into it!

So in theory, if I were to mess about with port forwarding and all, I could access my library from ANYWHERE in the world, on any device I chose.

I'm strangely excited by this discovery!