This module implements the Emacspeak EPub Bookshelf — a unified interface for organizing, locating and reading EPub EBooks on the emacspeak Audio Desktop. The epub reader is built using the Emacs Web Browser (EWW), and all of emacspeak’s EWW conveniences are available when reading EBooks — see See emacspeak-eww for useful tools including bookmarking and structured navigation. For now it supports epub2 — it will support epub3 some time in the future.
The main entry point is command emacspeak-epub bound to C-e
g. This command opens a new bookshelf buffer unless the
user has previously opened a specific bookshelf. A
bookshelf is a buffer that
lists books placed on a given bookshelf — these are listed by
title and author. The bookshelf buffer is in a
special mode that provides single-key commands for adding,
removing and finding books, as well as for opening the
selected book using Emacs’ built-in Web browser (eww).
The next few sections give a high-level overview of the emacspeak Bookshelf and EPub interaction, followed by detailed documentation on the various commands and user options.
In the simplest case, EBooks can be placed under a
specific directory (with sub-directories as needed).
Customize user option emacspeak-epub-library-directory to point to
this location. Here is a quick summary of commands for
organizing, saving and opening a bookshelf:
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-add-epub
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-open
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-clear
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-remove-this-book
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-rename
emacspeak-epub-locate-epubs
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-add-directory
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-remove-directory
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-redraw
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-open-epub
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-save
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-refresh
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-save
Gutenberg integration provides one-shot commands for downloading the latest copy of the Gutenberg catalog and finding and downloading the desired epub for offline reading.
emacspeak-epub-gutenberg-catalog
emacspeak-epub-gutenberg-download
Once downloaded, these EBooks can be organized under
emacspeak-epub-library-directory
For more advanced usage, see the next section on integrating
with Calibre catalogs.
Project Calibre enables the indexing and searching of
large EBook collections. Read the Calibre documentation for
organizing and indexing your EBook library. See user options
named emacspeak-epub-calibre-* for
customizing emacspeak to work with Calibre. Once set up,
Calibre integration provides the following commands from the
bookshelf buffer:
emacspeak-epub-calibre-results
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-calibre-author
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-calibre-search
emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-calibre-title
The most efficient means to read an EBook is to have EWW
render the entire book — this works well even for very large
EBooks given that EWW is efficient at rendering HTML.
Rendering the entire book means that all of the contents are
available for searching. To view an EBook in its entirety,
use command emacspeak-epub-eww. You
can open the EPub table of contents with command emacspeak-epub-open; for a well-constructed
epub, this TOC should provide hyperlinks to each section
listed in the table of contents.
emacspeak-epub-eww
emacspeak-epub-eww
emacspeak-epub-browse-files
emacspeak-epub-open
A Calibre Front-end. Letters do not insert themselves; instead, they are commands. Key Binding ——————————————————————————- RET emacspeak-epub-calibre-dired-at-point In addition to any hooks its parent mode ‘special-mode’ might have run, this mode runs the hook ‘emacspeak-calibre-mode-hook’, as the final or penultimate step during initialization.
Add EPubs found in specified directory to the bookshelf. Interactive prefix arg searches recursively in directory. (fn DIRECTORY &optional RECURSIVE)
Add epub file to current bookshelf. (fn EPUB-FILE)
Add results of an author search to current bookshelf. (fn PATTERN)
Add results of an title/author search to current bookshelf. (fn PATTERN)
Add results of an title search to current bookshelf. (fn PATTERN)
Clear all books from bookshelf.
Load bookshelf metadata from disk.
Load bookshelf metadata from specified bookshelf. (fn BOOKSHELF)
Open epub file and add it to current bookshelf. (fn EPUB-FILE)
Redraw Bookshelf. Optional interactive prefix arg author-first prints author at the left. (fn &optional AUTHOR-FIRST)
Refresh and redraw bookshelf.
Remove EPubs found in specified directory from the bookshelf. Interactive prefix arg searches recursively in directory. (fn DIRECTORY &optional RECURSIVE)
Remove the book on current line from this bookshelf. No book files are deleted.
Saves current bookshelf to specified name. Interactive prefix arg ‘overwrite’ will overwrite existing file. (fn NAME &optional OVERWRITE)
Save bookshelf metadata.
Browse list of HTML files in EPub. Useful if table of contents in toc.ncx is empty. (fn EPUB)
Open directory containing current result.
Show most recent Calibre search results.
Search for Epubs from Google Books. (fn QUERY)
Open Gutenberg catalog. Fetch if needed, or if refresh is T. (fn &optional REFRESH)
Open web page for specified book. Place download url for epub in kill ring. With interactive prefix arg ‘download’, download the epub. (fn BOOK-ID &optional DOWNLOAD)
Locate epub files using locate. (fn PATTERN)
An EPub Front-end. Letters do not insert themselves; instead, they are commands. Key Binding ——————————————————————————- C-a emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-add-directory C-d emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-remove-directory C-k emacspeak-epub-delete C-l emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-redraw RET emacspeak-epub-eww C-o emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-open-epub / emacspeak-epub-calibre-results A emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-calibre-author C emacspeak-epub-gutenberg-catalog G emacspeak-epub-google O emacspeak-epub-open-with-nov S emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-calibre-search T emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-calibre-title a emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-add-epub b emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-open c emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-clear d emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-remove-this-book e emacspeak-epub-eww f emacspeak-epub-browse-files g emacspeak-epub-gutenberg-download l emacspeak-epub-locate-epubs n next-line o emacspeak-epub-open p previous-line r emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-rename M-s emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-save C-x C-q emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-refresh C-x C-s emacspeak-epub-bookshelf-save In addition to any hooks its parent mode ‘special-mode’ might have run, this mode runs the hook ‘emacspeak-epub-mode-hook’, as the final or penultimate step during initialization.
Open specified Epub. Filename may need to be shell-quoted when called from Lisp. (fn EPUB-FILE)
Directory where we keep .bsf files defining various bookshelves.
Default Value:
"/home/raman/EBooks/bsf/"
Root of Calibre library.
Default Value:
"/home/raman/EBooks/calibre"
Base URL for Gutenberg mirror.
Default Value:
"http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/"
Suffix of book type we retrieve.
Default Value:
".epub.noimages"
Directory under which we store Epubs.
Default Value:
"/home/raman/EBooks/"