Work on GNOME Books has continued, and actually a great update is behind the door. Let’s get in…
When most of the functionality in the Read Mode was implemented it was time to start working on the Overview Mode. I am very excited to write about this update. The app is getting real good, and it is starting to fulfill some basic requirements making the user experience better.
OVERVIEW MODE
Overview Mode lists all the eBooks in the epub format that are part of your Books folder in your $HOME directory. Overview Mode is showing the cover of the eBook. Books can be listed in two modes, as a list and as a grid of icons.
Later on, some more information is going to be shown in the list mode. An interesting feature would also be to add a book details dialog, which will show all the information about the book.
By clicking one of the books a Read Mode opens, with the contents of the chosen book.
READ MODE
Read Mode was also changed with some design improvements. Title bar is updating with the book title. Icons for loading table of contents and page numbers (which are hopefully going to be discard in the future) are part of the title bar.
Hope you enjoyed this short post. The next step would be to create a roadmap towards the goal, so expect my update soon.
You learned French? Funny to see Boulet in your collection 🙂
Thank you very much for your work. To read ebooks out of the box with GNOME, really was a significant lack.
Not yet, it’s on my list 😉 Testing purposes.
Thank you for following my work.
If you would like to take a look, Boulet is French, but there is an English version
http://english.bouletcorp.com
Wow, I love it. I’m looking forward to replace my current reader with this one. Thank you for working on this.
Thank you for following. It’s great to get feedback from the future users!
I have something similar to your overview mode, but using gnome-documents’ codebase instead. One of the missing things is the ePub view. You have a somewhat working view, but it still doesn’t load external files. Any plans to fix that?
Hi, Bastien. The newest update brings loading of an external files. Of course, it needs more testing and improvements, but it loads all the files which you have in your $HOME/Books directory.
In the future gnome-documents’ codebase is probably going to be reused for the Overview Mode, as well as for reading .pdf’s.
I CC:ed you on:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704316
gnome-documents can already view comic books now, an ePub view would be highly appreciated! 🙂
Thanks Bastien. That’s great!
Talking about ~/Books : Please make sure its “integrated” into GNOME, so that for example Germans have ~/Bücher , French people ~/Livres and so on 😀
Hey Marta,
What would be important for me to know about the books I have, is something like a timeline from which decade they are. Showing a year would be helpful, and maybe filtering trough it would be cool, too 🙂 (Maybe a slider, I dont know)
Would make the sorting of books much more effective, and than of course comes the thing about genres, etc. as well, so maybe tag support ?
I know that this is a far too big topic, but Mac OS X for example just recently got support for Tags in files across all their applications, would be nice if GNOME would allow something similar 🙂 Else, managing a lot of Files/Books will get a mess.
I’m not that much of a internet reader to be honest but your blogs really nice, keep it up! I’ll go ahead and bookmark your site to come back down the road. Many thanks
Hello. What current status of this project?
Hi Guilermo,
thank you for your interest. The development of the project is on pause at the moment, as I am very busy at work. I got employed, and I also got the possibility to work on one another project of interest (at work, out of working hours). I hope to get some time soon as I really want to continue the development of GNOME Books.
The GNOME Books, stand alone application can be downloaded. It is usable but it has bugs and a lot of improvements is to be done, and the most important part – the integration with the GNOME Documents.
Regards
Good evening Marta,
I just found this nifty reader, it would perfectly accomodate the already existing `gnome-epub-thumbnailer` and could maybe even be used as a general GNOME epub engine, like for Evince [1]?
How can we as the community support you so you can maintain your existing work?
Would you need help getting in touch with the Evince and Documents people, for example?
Have fun with your new challenges; we need more simple software of this like to gain more traction for free alternatives.
Greetings
[1] https://martamilakovic.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/epub-support-in-evince/
Hi Marta,
I very happy to see your app on fedora 22! I would like to ask if I can do anything to read a book, because when I try to read some book says that I need to wait to next release (in spanish) http://i.imgur.com/Xodgjel.png
Maybe I can update the app…
Thanks, and best regards.
Hi Gabriel,
thank you very much for writing and following the progress of the app.
Unfortunately, this last couple of months I was too busy to continue work on the app, so I am not bringing any new updates. I am expecting to work on it in the future… And of course any help from developers is very welcome, so that we finally bring the app to a usable state.
Thanks again and best regards,
Marta
I’m sorry to tell you that it’s not Marta’s application in Fedora 22.
That’s correct Bestien. Sorry, I haven’t verify what application is in Fedora 22.
But my work wasn’t complete so it was not integrated.
Hi Marta,
So the fedora books app is a fork of your app?
Hope you find a time to complete your great app.
Thanks Bastien and Marta.
Best regards
Hi Gabriel,
No, it is not the fork of my app. It is separably build, as part of GNOME Documents app. I was working on the epub view, and I made a separate app for the testing and practice purposes.
The epub view could be integrated when it’s usable and bug free.
Cheers!
Hi. I’m really looking forward to news on this app! The Gnome Books I’ve been able to install only lists all the books, but can’t actually open any of them. Hoping to hear some news soon! Thanks for your work!
Hi Marta,
I’ve been checking on Gnome Books on a regular basis now because I really like the look and feel. I’d love to be able to switch to it from Calibre.
Are you still planning on working on the app at this point, and is e-reader management on the roadmap at all? I would love to help you out, but unfortunately I’m not a programmer. If there’s anything else though I would be ready to participate.
Cheers,
Mariano
Hi Mariano,
Thank you very much for writing and your interest. I would love to continue development on this project. I will have a look tonight what can be done. I might spend some hours to make it more stable and usable. 😀
Cheers,
Marta
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