How to get Bokeen Cybook v3 ebook reader to display Chinese with Stanza
I’ve been interested in e-book readers for a long time, and a good friend generously agreed to lend me his Bokeen Cybook v3 reader for a week or two to play with, since that is the only way you can really get a feel for this technology – just looking at it for a few minutes is not enough.
I will write a longer review later, but for now I wanted to post the solution to a problem that immediately bugged me: How to get the reader to display Chinese text? I had to experiment with a few different ways, but finally I found that you have to generate a Mobipocket file. For Mac, you can use the excellent Stanza to do this (I understand there are programs for Windows too, not sure about Linux, but hopefully there are options).
A small bug, it seems, in Stanza is that if you copy text from for example a webpage (many Chinese novels are available in full-text as one long webpage), and choose “Create new from clipboard” in Stanza, the linefeeds disappear. And for some reason, if I save the text in Textmate or TextEdit as UTF8 text, or even RTF, it doesn’t work, and the text becomes all garbled. However, if I copy the text into OpenOffice, or Word, and either save the file as .doc and open it in Stanza, or copy again from this program to Stanza, it works – with the linefeeds and paragraphs preserved.
So to summarize, copy from a webpage to OpenOffice, and then from OpenOffice to Stanza. Generate MobiPocket file, and drag it over to the ebook reader. Voilà, pure Chinese ebook goodness!
(This is using Stanza 1.0.0-beta16 – they might fix the loss of linefeeds in a subsequent update. Also, I hope Bokeen comes out with a new firmware update that enables you to read simple unicode txt or rtf files directly).
Stian
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July 18th, 2008 @ 10:01 pm
You mentioned Esperanto. I remember the pleasure, even joy when I completed Privat's "Karlo" at the age of about fourteen. I've gone on to use Esperanto in a dozen countries over the decades.
August 14th, 2008 @ 7:20 am
The Dolphins of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, translated into Italian, while I was living in Ticino in Switzerland. Anne is one of my favourite "light reading" authors and finding a book by her in Italian was a pleasant relief from reading all that academic Italian I had to do at university.
See you at CIDE. :)
Jasna
February 2nd, 2009 @ 12:09 pm
(Psst. Stian, it’s “Bookeen,” not “Bokeen.” There are substantially fewer boks in this model, so the company decided to change its name.
Also, the Cybook can read .html files natively (though it’s got minimal support for elaborate formatting and nothing for embedded images)—if you’ve put on a font that likes Chinese characters, try just saving the html file and plopping it into the ebooks folder.
May 20th, 2009 @ 9:15 am
Of course, what a great site and informative posts, I will add backlink – bookmark this site? Regards, Reader.
June 30th, 2009 @ 3:02 pm
Thats great material, like your stuff, just passing to say hi!