using "calibre" for "e-book management"

calibre - E-book management

• I listened to colleagues nearby here in the office this morning.
  
  
• Colleague A had gotten a Kindle as birthday present,
• he "certainly" doesn't want to get the typical publications for the Kindle,
• instead he wants to get dusty PDFs and whatever from the 16th century,
• and his initial question to colleague B was, whether the Kindle would read them.
• Colleague B suggested calibre to convert everything interesting to the Kindle format.
• I got bashed "a little" and laughed about for asking why not simply purchasing the bestseller suggested on the radio or by friends.

I myself like PDF a lot. Their pages still look like in printed books, i.e. the text is not flowing completely dynamically. The human memory supports graphical associations, i.e. you (sometimes) easily remember on what page and in what area you once read a term or a phrase. 

Apple won't carry an ebook because it mentions Amazon

Apple won't carry an ebook because it mentions Amazon - Boing Boing

… Apple rejected it again, telling her that they wouldn't sell her book because it mentioned Amazon, a competitor of its iBooks store. …

emacs documentation

I have proudly owned O'Reilly's "Learning GNU Emacs" since November 1996. It has always been a very, very valuable supplement to the info mode documentation prepared in Texinfo.

That book covers GNU Emacs version 19.30, nowadays I am using version 23.x resp. 22.x. Better GUI integration has happened since and variable customization.

As part of my project "let's create courses and presentations from my e-books!", I recently also acquired the 3rd edition of that fine book, and I used it today as PDF.

I was always happily searching and replacing in case-ignorant-mode. But sometimes my finger do things with emacs, that emacs takes more literally then it was meant. That way sometimes I destroy this and that. LIke my gnus folder and topics structure. One of the minor things is to inadvertently go into non-case-ignorant-mode. But today during my booking-keeping time, I "had to" create yet another nice and useful replacement rule for my bank statement. And again, non-case-ignorant-mode - bad, very bad!

I wasn't lucky, when I tried to look this up in the emacs standard documentation "The Emacs Editor", but looking it up in the O'Reilly book was a hit. There has always been a section titled "are emacs searches case-sensitive?". I speaks about case-fold-search and case-replace. I understand that, and I "customized" the variables. Looking at these PDF files using Snow Leopard and its Preview application is also a big plus, I want to tell you.