Use Calibre To Make eBook Cover Screensavers

I try to avoid Calibre because I find its UI to be aesthetically offensive and sometimes outright confounding.

So I’m late to find out about this plug-in. It will allow Sony Reader, PocketBook, and Kindle owners to use eBook covers as screensavers. A full discussion of it is here.

I found out about this only because the author just modified it to work with the Nook Touch too. That discussion is here.

Note that the new Sony Reader WiFi is supposed to have this capability built-in, so Calibre might not be needed for it.

And yes, I know the precise term for this is the standby screen, but screensaver has been in use for so long, it’s what people usually call them.

Previously here:

Add Your Own Picture to the Kindle Screensaver
HowTo: Sony Reader Screensavers
Screensavers For eInk eBook Devices
More eInk Screensavers
eInk Screensaver Experiments

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You Need This: GrabMyBooks

Liz Castro — who is an ePub expert — tweeted about something she was looking at called GrabMyBooks.

I went to the site and then downloaded the Firefox extension.

This thing kicks ass!

Tweet Of The Day: Netflix Edition

We're spinning off our hardware keyboard phone line into a new business called Qwertyster.

— Fake Stephen Elop (@fakeselop) September 19, 2011

The First Anti-eBook Person

That dishonor goes to Thomas Watson, Sr. of IBM!

UNIVAC: the troubled life of America’s first computer

But Eckert-Mauchly could not handle this volume of work on its own. Its principals drastically underbid on key contracts. After a plane crash killed the corporation’s board president, the inventors and Totalisor clashed over the viability of the project. The duo then went to IBM for backing and met with Thomas Watson Junior and Senior, but could not convince the elder executive of the UNIVAC’s viability.

“Having built his career on punch cards,” Watson Jr. later reflected, “Dad distrusted magnetic tape instinctively. On a punch card, you had a piece of information that was permanent. You could see it and hold it in your hand…. But with magnetic tape, your data were stored invisibly on a medium that was designed to be erased and reused.”

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

That’s the same objection people still raise against eBooks.

Yet I wonder how many have stuck to using a typewriter so they can “hold in their hand” what they’ve written?