NewsForge: Creating eBooks with Open Source Tools

"Traditional printed books beat ebooks in almost every respect except one: portability. While it's nice to relax on the sofa with a book in your hand, lugging a 500-page hardcover volume when you are on the move isn't all that appealing. But if your favourite book is available in an electronic format, you can easily turn it into an ebook and read it on your Pocket PC or Palm OS device.

"To convert a text you like into an ebook, you need two things: the Sunrise desktop conversion tool and the Plucker reader for your mobile device. Actually, Plucker includes its own desktop component, but Sunrise offers some nifty features. Notably, it supports conversion between different encodings, which can come in handy if you plan to read ebooks in languages using alphabets other than Latin. Like Plucker, Sunrise can run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Linux, but it requires Java Runtime Environment (available free of charge at www.java.com). The official Plucker reader is available only for Palm OS-based devices, but there is also a Plucker-compatible open source reader for Pocket PC called Vade Mecum..."

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