Ebook reading on powerpc

[skinniezinho]

Hi everyone,
I was fiddling around to read some ebooks on my powerbook g4 12.
Searching a bit for the best applications I have found this PPC Luddite blog entry which gave me the following options:

- Adobe Digital Editions - this one a bit slow
- iTextit express - a bit faster, converts to RTF, which isn't very eye candy.
- Calibre 0.7.2.8 - can't open some epubs that I have
Searching for more solutions, found this website with other solutions:

- Sony Reader Library 3.3
- Stanza

For Amazon Kindle books (bought) you can use kindle cloud reader, works fine for me on latest webkit. faster if you let the book "download".
None of them were better than the previous (for me), so for the second time I decided to find the old ported versions of fbreader (which is what I use on Android tablet and iOS), there is some info on this website but there are no powerpc compatible files.
Contacted the developer but he didn't had the files. After more searching managed to source them, if somebody wants to try they are here.
Fbreader is much faster, and in my opinion much more good looking than the alternatives.
I guess it would be nice if we could have the latest alpha 0.99.5 (2012) (there are linux ppc versions of it).
Do you think it would be easy to port?
Hope I could help someone making ppc more usable!

 

[Lastic]

Well the question is , where is the 0.99.5 source-code ?

Google to the rescue ,it's here 0.99.4 : FBReader 0.99.4 sources archive

And here are the instructions on how to build it :

https://github.com/geometer/FBReader

The other dependencies can be installed with Macports where we have Qt version 4.8.7_5 , fribidi version 0.19.7, linebreak version 2.0.

 

[swamprock]

I think an older version of the EPUBReader addon for TFF/Firefox works pretty well for PowerPC and eBooks. Version 1.5.0.12 is your best bet- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/versions/

 

[Fidus]

My favourite for ppc-macs was/is "ereader" (v. 2.7fp +osx10.4) from Palm Digital Media.
Great books-reader for PDB-Files. Calibre makes it easy convert epub-files to pdb-files.
https://download.cnet.com/mac/palm-...4-70472-1.html?osNamesExact=Mac+OS+X+10.4+PPC

 

[Lastic]

After getting the makefile to include the Macports libraries, it fails in glib and fribidi although they’re both installed.

Looks like the Gentoo people have the same issue

 

[bobesch]

My favourite for ppc-macs was/is "ereader" (v. 2.7fp +osx10.4) from Palm Digital Media.
Great books-reader for PDB-Files. Calibre makes it easy convert epub-files to pdb-files.
https://download.cnet.com/mac/palm-...4-70472-1.html?osNamesExact=Mac+OS+X+10.4+PPC

Great, thanx! eReader does even work with El Cap on my early 2008 MBP.

The forgotten missing link to my old Palm-devices (though all sources leading to legacy PalmOS and progs seem to be extinguished ...)
isilo (http://www.isilo.com) is another promising survivor of the Palm-era to both read eBooks and create archives of a self-determined hierarchy of web-sites.