More Readers' Inquiries Answered The Old Way: Ebooks

Some time ago it occurred to me to remember lold sections of readers' letters from popular magazines. Written in a very particular way they were the closest thing to Facebook groups on paper.

Depending on the theme of the magazine, you could ask questions answered by the editors and also get addresses to exchange correspondence with other people with the same interests.

Applying the same style of the questions and answers of the time, we are going to try to solve some concerns that affect linuxeros.

More inquiries from readers

Points of view

Lords Linux Adictos

I have a collection of ebooks bought in the bookstore named Rio de América del Sur. I am very shortsighted and the configuration options of the cloud reader (the application no longer works under Wine) are not enough for me to read comfortably.

Some time ago there was a plugin for Caliber that allowed you to remove DRM and read with the ebook reader. But, it is no longer possible.

Can you suggest an alternative?

Mr magtux

Dear Mr Magtux:

As you well point out, the Caliber plugin to remove DRM no longer works. The alternative is to take screenshots of each page in the library's cloud reader and then apply character recognition. Fortunately, it is a process that can be automated.

You need two programs available in the repositories of any Linux distribution.

• Xdotools: Simulates the pressing of the mouse button every certain period of time indicated .. We are going to use it for the page turn.
• Scrot: Take the screenshots.

For character recognition you need the packages

• tesseract and tesseract.spa
• Gscan2pdf if you want a graphical interface.

Recognizing the text

The procedure

• Open your browser and go to the cloud reader. Find the book and go to the front page.
• Open the terminal and minimize it. Locate it on the left side of the browser.
• In the terminal type xdotool getmouselocation but don't press Enter.
• Bring the pointer to the middle of the screen and to the right margin. Press Enter.
• Take note of the X and Y values.

Open the text editor and copy the following:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]; do
xdotool mousemove XXXX YYY click 1 &
scrot -q 100 '%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S.png' -e 'mv $f ~/Imágenes/'
sleep 20
done
Remember to replace X and Y with the corresponding values. Save the file as script.sh. Then move the pointer to the file icon and with the right button click on Properties. Give it permission to execute.

Launch the script with ./script.sh, set the browser to full screen and wait for it to finish capturing all the pages. You'll find out when the book is finished.
Minimize the browser and close the terminal.
Go to the Images folder and delete the ones you won't need.

Recognizing text in images

1. Open Gscan2pdf.
2. If it gives you an error message, ignore it. Click on Open and load all the images.
3. Go to menu Tools / OCR.
4. Choose All pages, determine the language and click Start OCR.
5. Once the recognition is complete, click on Save, choose Text as format and then the location and name of the file.
6. Open the file with LibreOffice, make all the formatting changes you want, and save as PDF or Epub.

The things to hear!

Dear friends of Linux Adictos:

I travel a lot on public transport (usually on my feet) and I get very bored with radio and podcasts.

Are there open source programs to create audiobooks from my ebooks on Windows?

Thank you very much.

The boring traveler

Dear bored traveler:

Taking advantage of the voices for screen reading that Windows includes, and three open source applications you can create audiobooks from your ebooks without problems.

The programs you need are three:

• Caliber
• OBS STUDIO
• Audacity

The procedure

The first thing you have to do is go to the Windows configuration panel, select the option  Narrator Accessibility and choose the voice that you like the most.

Caliber is made up of three programs, the collection manager, the ebook editor and the ebook reader. This is what we are going to use.

1. Place the pointer on the book that you want to switch to audio and with the right button click on Open with Ebook Viewer.
2. Go to the home page.
3. Open OBS Studio and if you didn't, start the setup wizard in the optimized for recording option.
4. Click on the + sign and Choose the option Record audio output.
5. Press on Start Recording.
6. Go back to the Caliber reader and press Read aloud.

When you finish reading you can stop the recording in OBS STUDIO.

You may want to eliminate dead times and subdivide into chapters. You can do this with Audacity.

In Audacity you just have to place the pointer where you want to make the cut, click to place a mark and drag the space to select it. Then you can copy, paste into a new window and save in your preferred audio format.

All this procedure can also be done in Linux, you only need to install the package speech dispatcher. But the resulting voice is quite robotic.