Reading Eeebooks on Eeebuntu
I’m using Eeebuntu on my Asus eee, and I happen to have a ton of unprotected ebooks in Microsoft’s proprietary .LIT format. Not a match made in heaven. But I like the idea of using my netbook as an ebook reader. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find native Linux software to read Lit files. But I was able to use Wine to install Microsoft Reader.
Wine is a Linux application that allows some Windows programs to run under Linux at native speeds (Wine Is Not an Emulator! … it’s a compatibility layer).
I just installed Wine from the repositories, then I downloaded msvcirt.dll from here (unzip it and place it in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows). Then I downloaded Microsoft Reader from here and installed it. Once installed, it seems to work fine. You can even drag and drop Lit files onto Reader to add them to the library, which surprised me a little.
But alas, Microsoft Reader doesn’t re-flow text to take advantage of my Netbook’s small-but-wide screen. Linux app FBReader does this well, but doesn’t support Lit files. There are command line tools to convert the files to a supported format, and they work fine, but book names are often long and full of spaces – a command line tool is a bit of a hassle.
Another Windows app saved the day. The ABC Amber Lit Converter is always present on my windows machines. It converts Lit files to a number of formats, including several supported by FBReader. I installed it with Wine, and it works fine once the “skin” option is turned off under the “View” menu. I can now convert any Lit file (unprotected, of course) to fb2 format and read it in FBReader.
Here’s a shot of FBReader and Microsoft Reader both running at the same time on my netbook — you can see the advantage FBReader offers on the eee’s wide screen (click to enlarge):
