Bread and Bread-library: Book-reader for Emacs

[Dmitri Minaev]

The week of sick leave was quite productive :). I wrote my first Elisp
app. Comments, advices and free Elisp lessons are appeciated :)

                 Bread and Bread-library: Book-reader for Emacs
                 ==============================================

Author: Dmitri Minaev
Date: 2008/05/04 07:57:32 AM


Table of Contents
=================
1 Intro
2 What ebook reading software should do
    2.1 Catalog
    2.2 Book reader
3 Bread-mode: mode for reading Fictionbook2 books
4 Bread-library: cataloging ebooks
5 Installation
    5.1 Supporting packages
        5.1.1 Required
        5.1.2 Recommended
6 Todo


1 Intro
~~~~~~~
  I miss good  Linux software for keeping a catalog  of ebooks and for
  reading  ebooks. It's  strange that  such software  hasn't  yet been
  written.    Or  has   it?    There  are   some  general   cataloging
  applications, like Alexandria and  Tellico. They miss some necessary
  features,  though.   Anyway, I  would  prefer  an Emacs-based  ebook
  reader to any  other GUI or console tool.  Almost  all parts of such
  book-reading  software   are  already  written:   Org-mode  for  the
  catalogue, standard  bookmarks to remember  positions, view-mode for
  comfortable scrolling, etc. Why not put them all together?

2 What ebook reading software should do
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2.1 Catalog
===========
   1. Various views of the collection:
      - by title;
      - by author;
      - by genre.
   2. Tagging and search by tags.
   3. Rating books and sorting by rating.
   4. Annotations.
   5. Track state: books to read, read books, unfinished books.
   6. Automatic cataloging: add new files from a library directory.

2.2 Book reader
===============
   This  part is less  important for  me, because  I prefer  my Hanlin
   Ereader v3 to reading from LCD screen.

   1.  Support   multiple  file  formats:  txt,  html,   pdf  and  fb2
      (Fictionbook2,  xml-based   format  developed  specifically  for
      fiction  texts,   see  [Fictionbook.org]  for   specification  and
      [Fictionbook.ru] for books  in fb2). For graphics-enabled formats,
      images should be displayed.
   2. Support footnotes and hyperlinks.
   3. Save and restore positions in books.
   4. Include a bookmark manager.

3 Bread-mode: mode for reading Fictionbook2 books
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  Currently,  it's  just  a  tiny hack.  Bread-mode  doesn't  support
  footnotes, hyperlinks, images and text formatting.

  Bread-mode turns on sgml-mode, calls `sgml-tags-invible' to hide all
  tags, enables longlines-mode for  better readability and switches to
  view-mode.   The  result  is   more  or  less  acceptable  for  most
  Fictionbook2 files

  Bookmarks are  standard Emacs  bookmarks. Current positions  may be
  memorized with `session.el', for example.


4 Bread-library: cataloging ebooks
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   Bread-library  keeps  a list  of  ebooks  on  your hard  disk  and
   provides  a way  to sort,  search, categorize,  rate  and annotate
   them.

   The first idea was to  clone the Emms-browser. I began copying and
   pasting, but then I found what seems to be a better alternative.

   For more  than 1 year I used  to keep my reading  journal in Emacs
   Org-mode.  I have  developed a  file  structure that  I find  very
   useful.
   1. Categories are used to rate books from 0 to 9.
   2.  Every book  may be  in one  of the  following  states: TOREAD,
      READING, POSTPONED, THROWNAWAY and DONE.
   3. Books are tagged to classify them by genres. The most used tags
      are:      `autobiographical',      `fiction',     `nonfiction',
      `modernclassics',   `crypto',   `math',   `science',   `scifi',
      `philosophy', `history',  `geography', `politics', `fairytale',
      `kids'.

   I wanted to keep this setup  in Bread mode. It meant that the book
   manager  should  use  Org-mode.  However,  processing  information
   stored in a  weakly formalized text may be  a non-trivial task. Of
   course, the most  straight-forward way to solve the  task would be
   to  use  sexps  as   back-end  for  the  information  storage  and
   processing. Sexps  could be easily  manipulated to sort  and group
   the books in whatever way we want.

   Sexps are not  the most efficient storage speedwise,  but I wanted
   to see how  many books may be stored  in such sexp-database before
   efficiency  problems make me  re-write Bread-library  with hashes.
   Now,  I   know  that  Bread-library  copes,  at   least,  with  400
   books. I've  got a feeling, though,  that the reply  will slow down
   noticeably with 600-800 books.

   After    installation,     Bread-library    is    launched    with
   `bread-library-browse'   command.   It   loads   the   data   from
   `~/.bread-library'   file   and    renders   its   contents   into
   Org-mode.     Bread-library      defines     a     minor     mode,
   `bread-library-mode',  which  provides  the  following  additional
   keybindings:
   - `C-x g g': group books by genre and by author;
   - `C-x g a': group books by author (the default view);
   - `C-x g t': sort books by title;
   - `C-x x': quit Bread library, saving the database.

   The  rendered  Org  file   is  an  (almost)  fully  functional  Org
   file. Clicking  on the hyperlink will  open the file.   You can use
   `S-Left' and `S-Right' to switch states of the books, or use `S-Up'
   and `S-Down' to set rating.  You  can set and modify tags with `C-c
   C-c'. `C-c \' will search by tags. You can edit the entries and the
   changes will  be saved.   The only  trick is that  the name  of the
   author, the title, genre and file path are stored in the properties
   of the entry, not in its header. The changes made in the header and
   in the hyperlink will not be saved.

   You can even add new entries  in this buffer, as long as you stick
   to the format  of the entries. However, a  more comfortable way to
   add books to the catalog is  using a tiny function from Dired (see
   below,  under Installation. When  a book  is added  through Dired,
   Bread-library    attempts   to    extract   metadata    from   the
   file. Currently,  Bread-library can  do it for  Fictionbook2 files
   only (and imperfectly).


5 Installation
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    1. Put bread.el  and bread-library.el  into a  directory  in your
       load-path.
    2. Set up Org-mode.
    3. Add to the init file the following code:

       (eval-after-load "dired"
         '(define-key dired-mode-map "\C-xl" 'dired-bread-add-book))
       (defun dired-bread-add-book ()
         (interactive)
         (bread-library-add-book (dired-get-filename)))
       (autoload 'bread-mode "bread" "Fictionbook2 mode" t)
       (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.fb2$" . bread-mode))

5.1 Supporting packages
=======================

5.1.1 Required
--------------
    1. Org-mode
    2. Sgml-mode
    3. Dired

5.1.2 Recommended
-----------------
    1. session.el

6 Todo
~~~~~~
  1. Enhance metadata extraction for fb2 files.
  2. Extract metadata from other files.
  3. Learn more on Emacs regexps :).
  4. Modify Org-mode hyperlinks  to use only certain modes: doc-view
     for PDF, w3m for html, etc.
  5. Images for fb2.
  6. Mass addition of books by traversing the given directory.
  7. Add support of zipped files.
  8. Add Org-mode tags selection to bread-library-add-book.
  9. Offer a list of already used genres when adding new books.
  10. Lots more :)





-- 
With best regards,
Dmitri Minaev

Russian history blog: http://minaev.blogspot.com

bread-0.1.tgz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data