Turn Your Netbook Into An E-book Reader

The Story

A while before, I was in the checkout process of Amazon buying a few books. I saw my netbook in front of me and thought, why I am not using it for reading books?

There is xrandr to rotate the screen. And a lightweight pdf reader as xpdf.

I have searched for the books that I am ordering. Wow, I have found every book easily.

I have written a bash script to ease the process.

The cool thing about xpdf is it has a “Reverse Video” mode that reverses the colors. Which means you can read your book with white text on black background. I think It’s really comfortable.

What is needed?

• A netbook running Linux
• Xpdf
• Dailog
• This bash script
• PDF files to read (what a surprise!)

What the script does?

• When you run it, it show a list of PDFs in a directory recursively.
• You choose one of them.
• It rotates the screen to the left.
• Runs the xpdf in reverse video mode.
• It then navigates you to the page where you left before.
• You read, read and read.
• When you are done, you press Q.
• It rotates the screen to normal.
• It then asks the page where you left and saves it for the next time.

Using the script

Download

Taken from the comments in the script:

1. Set EBOOK_ARCHIVE setting to where your PDFs are.
2. Create a pageinfo dir somewhere and set EBOOK_PAGEINFO setting to that dir.
3. Run this script.

What can be done to improve

The most disturbing thing is it asks you for the last page you left. This can be removed if we can patch the xpdf. For example, GNOME’s evince has this feature, it returns to the page where you left in a PDF. I can’t see any effort to add xpdf this feature. I want to do that but I’m afraid I won’t have the time to do it.

If you have an idea, bug report or a patch, !