Introduction and Images

Recent versions of Safari include a feature called Reading List which “lets you save web pages to read or browse later.” It’s essentially a queue of temporary bookmarks. It looks like this:

SafariReadingList.recipe is a script for Calibre which generates an ebook from the unread items in your Reading List. Each bookmark is represented as a chapter in the ebook. The oldest bookmark appears first. Here’s what the output looks like in Calibre’s ebook viewer:

Where’s what the output looks like on a Kindle 3:

Installation and Usage

This script requires Calibre. You should familiarize yourself with the interface before proceeding.

Here’s how to install the script:

1. Download SafariReadingList.recipe
2. In Calibre, go to Fetch News > Add a custom news source.
3. Click Load recipe from file and select the downloaded recipe.
4. Click Close and, if prompted to continue, click Yes.

Here’s how to run the script when you are ready to get an ebook of your Reading List:

1. In Calibre, go to Fetch News > Schedule news download.
2. Locate and select the new Safari Reading List recipe.
3. Click Download now. The new issue of your Safari Reading List will appear in your library momentarily.

Alternatively, you can instruct Calibre to run the script automatically at regular intervals. This way, a current copy of your Reading List ebook will always be ready to read.

Notes

• This recipe does not modify your Reading List. Articles will remain in your Reading List until you manually remove them.
• If you have enabled iCloud bookmark sharing, your Reading List will be synced and accessible on all your devices. Cool, huh?
• Interested in reading long articles on an ereader, but you’d rather not deal with Calibre and buggy scripts you found on some guy’s website? No problem. Check out Instapaper. It can do all this and more.
• You can add items to Reading List programmatically with Safari’s add reading list item AppleScript command, but as far as I know this is the first third-party thingy to actually read items from Reading List. Probably because reading undocumented files is unwise.
• This script doesn’t do much error checking and is therefore liable to fail in a variety of cases. Go fork it and submit fixes.

I’ve got a new bike lock. I upgraded from a combination cable lock to a U-lock with a key. It’s an OnGuard Bulldog and it is charged with the defense of the realm (the realm being my bicycle).

I derive an inordinate amount of pleasure from figuring out how to mount equipment on bikes. In this case, I’ve “holstered” the lock between the seat tube and the rear rack. It sits flush with the outermost tubing of the rack and inside the plane of the crank. It’s out of the way while pedaling but easy to access when needed.

I am uncertain how sturdy the plastic mounting clip will prove to be in the long run, but it’s a clever three-piece design that permits installation in nearly any orientation. The lock snaps into place with a reassuringly positive click, but releases smoothly when the yellow tab is pressed.

The purchase of this lock was prompted by the mutinous dereliction of duty exhibited by its predecessor. After years of faithful service, one morning it refused to release my steed as ordered. (Actually, I suspect I must have accidentally reset the combination while fumbling with it in the dark the night before.) Having no choice but to dance with the dark side in order to free my own ride, I cut the lock.

It was alarmingly easy. I consider locks of any sort a deterrent to opportunistic theft only, but even so I decided a beefier lock was a worthwhile investment. A cable lock can be cut quickly with a pair of snips that fit in your pocket.

Recently, I had a chance to play around with a Nook Simple Touch. I thought I would share a few observations for the benefit of anyone interested in comparing these ereaders.

The Kindle 3 keyboard and “SYM” punctuation menu.

First and foremost, the Nook’s on-screen keyboard is superior to the Kindle’s keyboard. (Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, agrees.) It is more responsive – the Kindle’s buttons require some effort to depress – and it is arranged more intuitively. The buttons on the Kindle keyboard are aligned oddly compared to any other QWERTY keyboard; the difference may appear minor, but I sometimes mis-type letters because of it. Numbers and punctuation characters seem easier to access as well. Navigating the Kindle SYM menu with the joystick is so tedious I often skip it, resulting in notes that later seem embarrassingly incoherent and inchoate.

Writing more about what I’m reading is a habit I’m happy to cultivate. Tools that help me do so legibly are welcome.

A common response to these complaints is to ask what need there is to type when reading at all. That’s a valid question. My answer is that the ability to annotate without constraint (in terms of etiquette as well as available space) has lead me to write more frequently about what I’m reading. This is a habit I am happy to cultivate. Tools that help me do so legibly are welcome.

The topic of annotation leads to my second observation: selecting text on the Nook by touching it on screen is quicker (and perhaps less disruptive to the nascent thoughts you want to write down) than using the Kindle joystick to toggle your way across the page.

None of these touch-based advantages are necessarily unique to the Nook. Ereader apps for iOS offer similar benefits, and I presume the Kindle Touch and other touchscreen readers do, too.

The Kindle has its merits, though. I like that the screen is inert – like the page of the book – because it means I can hold or handle the device pretty much however I want without causing accidental input. I feel that one reason I’ve been able to read comfortably on the Kindle is that I can indeed read comfortably with it – lying in bed, draped across a chair, or lounging in any one of a number of other improbable poses. If I’m holding the Kindle upside down or sideways, it’s easiest to support with a steady grip, as in the photo above. Would that placement of my thumb turn the page on a touchscreen reader? Gripping a book by nothing but the margins is no way to live – you gotta jump right in and get your hands on the page.

One last point for the Nook, though – it is apparently straightforward to upload your own “screensaver” images. No offense to Steinbeck and the other dead authors of Important Works who inhabit the Kindle cover, but I’d love to put my own photos or artwork on screen for change. Displaying cover art from the ebooks on the device would be nice, too. (To be fair, it evidently is possible – but only with unsupported software.)

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I’ve been talking about the Kindle and Nook hardware, but a comprehensive assessment must also take into account the associated stores. You certainly can get ebooks from sources besides Amazon or Barnes & Noble; for instance, Weightless Books sells ebook versions of some of my favorite short fiction magazines, and Project Gutenberg is the go-to place for classics now in the public domain. The significant limitation is that the DRM-encrypted ebooks you do purchase from the big stores are essentially tethered to those vendors’ devices, which must be a factor in your choice. The problem is complex and a discussion of solutions is outside the scope of this post.

(In brief, however, my view is that just as nobody can tell you what you’re allowed to read, nobody should be able to tell you how or where you’re allowed to read, either. And if they do, they’re retrograde enemies of the Enlightenment, so fie on them and their feudal desires! Etc.)

Here is a portrait I did of Matthew Sanborn Smith, SF author and host of the hilarious bite-size bizarro podcast Beware the Hairy Mango. Matthew recently put out a call for fan art (“fart”). Coincidentally, I’ve been kicking around the idea of a portfolio of podcast host portraits, so I took the opportunity to practice taking a drawing from sketchbook doodle to finished composition, such as it is. At right is my sketch (based on Matthew’s Twitter icon) and at left is the digital version. The background colors are based on the podcast’s website color scheme and the rest of the palette is, of course, mango-colored.

I hope to continue doing more art projects. Help establish the habit and follow my new Weekend Artifact series!

Your comments and constructive criticisms are welcome.

Strange Horizons is a weekly magazine of and about speculative fiction. Calibre is a free and open source ebook library management application.

Calibre has an extensible system “for downloading news from the Internet and converting it into an ebook.” The scripts Calibre uses to retrieve and format news are known as recipes. Recipes can be configured as simple RSS readers or as custom Python scripts using Calibre’s recipe API.

Strange Horizons is published online as a web site. This Calibre recipe retrieves the current issue of Strange Horizons and outputs an ebook suitable for reading on a Kindle or other ereader device.

The script and other details, including installation and usage notes, are available on GitHub.

Update: this recipe has been included in Calibre 0.8.38.

Download the Kindle Collections plugin. As of the time of this writing, the current version is 1.7.10. Go to Calibre Preferences > Advanced > Plugins and click Load plugin from file. Select the Kindle Collections.zip file you downloaded. Now it should appear in the list of installed plugins:

Click Apply and close the preferences window.

When your Kindle is connected by USB, choose Modify Kindle Settings… from the Kindle Collections toolbar button menu:

Check Allow changing justification and click Save.

Now you will notice a new option in your Kindle’s font settings panel: justification!

Left justification doesn’t work with all ebooks, unfortunately, but as I learn more about ebook formats it may turn out to be something that can be tweaked as well.

Calibre is an ebook management application. You can use it to convert ebooks to different formats, to edit metadata, or to organize and browse your ebook library. It can also act as a “Content Server”, providing an easy way to publish a searchable online catalog of your ebooks. This feature is useful for accessing your ebooks on different computers and devices. It could also be useful for libraries or research groups interested in sharing material over the internet.

In this post, I’ll show how to setup the Calibre Content Server and share a few examples.

The Calibre interface can appear pretty complicated at first. In the screenshot above, I’ve already simplified it to suit my needs by adjusting Preferences > Interface > Toolbar > The main toolbar. The buttons in the bottom right of the window toggle the panels surrounding the central list of books: the tag browser, the cover browser, and the selected book details (hidden).

You can use the Connect/share toolbar button to turn the Content Server on and off. If it’s not already visible, visit the toolbar preferences again and add it to the list of current actions:

Then, to share your ebooks, select Start Content Server from the Connect/share button menu. (Depending on your system settings, at this point your computer might ask if want to grant Calibre network access; if so, approve the request.)

(By default, no password is required to access the Content Server. I’ll show you how to set a password and a few other options in a bit.)

Now go to your web browser and enter 127.0.0.1:8080 as the URL. (127.0.0.1 is a special address that refers to your own computer; 8080 is the default port of the Calibre Content Server.) You’ll see a nice catalog screen generated by Calibre:

You can browse the library by any of the provided categories, or you can enter a query in the Search field. Searching is sensitive to metadata as well as title and author, so you can search by publisher, publication date, ISBN, or any other attributes associated with the items in your library.

Here I’ve searched for issues of Lightspeed Magazine and clicked the Details link to see more information about an issue. If your ebooks have cover art, Calibre does a nice job incorporating it into the interface.

To download the ebook, click the Get button that appears under the cover art in the search results (not visible above), or click any of the format links to download the book in a specific format (EPUB, MOBI, etc.). Of course, in this example, we’re browsing the catalog on the same computer the server is running on, so we already have access to all the content.

To browse the catalog from a different computer on the local network, replace 127.0.0.1 with the server’s actual IP number. On a Mac, you can find this under System Preferences > Network.

Now may be a good time to set a password. In Calibre, go to Preferences > Sharing > Sharing over the net to specify a password. You can also choose to start the Content Server automatically whenever Calibre is running.

Visitors will now be prompted to provide the username and password before the catalog is displayed.

You can access the catalog from other devices, too. On a Kindle, press Home > Menu and go to Experimental > launch browser. Enter the server’s address (in my case, it’s 192.168.1.5:8080, but your network will differ). If you set a password, you’ll be prompted to log in.

Although the Kindle keyboard is cumbersome, the browser can navigate the catalog competently.

Note that I’ve appended /browse to the URL to explicitly request the full interface. Otherwise, a simplified mobile listing appears. In either case, select a MOBI link to download the ebook directly to the Kindle:

You can browse the catalog with Safari on an iOS device, although an even smoother solution is to use a free e-reader app called Stanza (although Stanza’s long-term future is unclear, since it was bought by Amazon). Go to Stanza’s Get Books > Shared tab; if you’re on the same local network as the Content Server, it should appear automatically under Computers Sharing Books. (You can also click + to add it manually to the list of Book Sources.) Select the server and log in.

Stanza will present a searchable list of categories, similar to the web interface. When you select an ebook, tap Download to save it to your Stanza library.

Making your ebook catalog available over the internet (not just your local network) is possible, but the configuration depends on your network. For home networks, a few router settings may be sufficient (I’ll consider a follow-up post with details). In an institutional environment with more complex technical or political characteristics, it may be less feasible.