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.

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.)

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.

The currently discounted title is Consider Phlebas, the first novel in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series. It’s far-future space opera. Now, I am known to opine that science fiction is made of richer stuff than just rockets and robots, but hey – I like rockets and robots, too.

I read a more recent Culture novel last year (Matter). While enjoyable, I recall that it felt a bit haphazard, as if I’d tuned in to a series too late to catch the introduction and was relying on recaps to catch up – which is evidently exactly what I did. So, for $0.99, I’ll pop Consider Phlebas into the queue and enjoy the world-building from the beginning.

“No distinction was drawn between the arts and the crafts; art was not considered as having a place in life, but as being a basic technique of life, like speech.”

(As with art, so with science.)

The quote is an excerpt from a description of the egalitarian culture of the protagonist’s homeland.

The book is a dialectical dissection of ideas about culture and society and belonging and belongings, told through the device of the main character’s attempt to bridge two very different but intimately related worlds. From my vantage point halfway through the book, the central question is whether the two peoples will be reunited – or whether the reuniter will ultimately find himself without a people. The title underscores that risk, and reminds me of the challenges faced by all who would seek compromise.

What’d I get? Short stories by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. A regional field guide to trees. More short stories by authors I like. Poems about upstate NY by Dugan Gilman. A history of religion in the US for a friend’s research, and, last but not least, E. O. Wilson’s Diversity of Life.

Not too shabby!

October in the Chair

The boy ran away
and found a friend with whom to play
and maybe stay.

In high school, some of our cross country routes took us through a cemetery. Some folks said it wasn’t an appropriate place to run, but I always figured the residents wouldn’t mind the company.

Other People

Who is the demon
who resurrects your regrets?
Feelings, flayed, expire.

Gaiman’s comments on this compact parable introduced me to the “Möbius story” label for cyclical stories. This is the first of two or three summarized here.

The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch

Evening on the town:
at the circus, underground,
kingdoms, lost, are found.

While they were in the fifth room, the prim biologist said she wished the Smilodon was not extinct. In the eighth room, the Cabinet of Wishes Fulfill’d, she was chosen as a volunteer.

Apparently this story was partly inspired by a Frazetta painting. Awesome.

Feeders and Eaters

We all have our needs -
a hunger for friends, or meat;
and some of us feed.

Ever run in to someone you used to know, and wonder what happened to them? Ever wish they hadn’t told you?

Pages from a Journal Found in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky

Dreams of roads and rain
in America’s motels,
searching for yourself.

There’s no better place to work out what you’re after than a booth at an all-night diner. If that doesn’t lead anywhere, you might really be lost – or at least there’s a long road ahead. Refill?

Sunbird

Barbecue Sunbird -
a summer delicacy!
Ashes, hatch, repeat.

I want to hang out with Zebediah T. Crawcrustle.

The Monarch of the Glen

Each year, here we meet
to drink and feast but most to
make you monsters weep.

This story features characters from American Gods, and is set in the world of that novel. It’s a spin on the legend of Beowulf and Grendel, inflected by the American Gods idea that mythical figures exist but subsist only on the strength of human belief. The central question of Monarch of the Glen is simply this: what makes a monster?

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Confrontation and acknowledgement transforms fear into an understanding of risk. To face fear – or to embrace joy, for that matter – is not to be deluded by denial or delight, but to be human: to recognize emotion as an indicator of important experience.

As a cognitive tool, the Litany guides us to observe and identify sources of uncertainty. Observation changes challenges by changing how we see them; the paralyzing fog is dispelled by our gaze to reveal specific obstacles that can be attended to in turn.

I think this is especially useful as an approach to the anxiety that can sometimes inhibit opportunity or ambition. What will you tackle next?