varnie/hackedupreader

CoolReader 3 X11 gui port for Kindle Touch, minimally adapted for the touch interface

HackedUpReader for Kindle Touch

HackedUpReader is a CoolReader 3 port for the Kindle Touch using the X11 gui of the CoolReader project, minimally adapted for the touch interface.

It is only meant to act as a temporary solution to get a ePub reader for the Kindle Touch.

HackedUpReader is by no means thought for general usage. Currently you need to be familiar with accessing your Kindle Touch and starting programs from the command line to use it.

What works:

• reading e-books
• opening other e-books
• setting options
• battery display
• searching
• bookmarking
• screen refresh for removing e-ink artifacts
  • automatic after a configurable amount of pages

What doesn't work:

• dictionary support

Installation and running

You can download either download the zip or tar.gz file. The only difference is that the zip file also contains a GUI launcher extension.

The zip file contains standard Kindle update files. Put the hackedupreader_x.x.x_install.bin into your user data directory, select Menu -> Settings -> Menu -> Update Your Kindle for installing it.

The tar.gz only contains HackedUpReader. Extract the tar.gz file into your Kindle Touch user data directory.

ssh into your Kindle Touch and start it with:

/mnt/us/hackedupreader/bin/cr3 /mnt/us/path/to/your/ebook.epub &

Because of some hard coded paths HackedUpReader must be in the /mnt/us/hackedupreader directory.

For display quality and preventing crashes when using non-standard fonts install this version of the freetype library: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1998991#post1998991

There are 2 different GUI launcher extensions:

• https://github.com/bhaak/HackedUpReaderExtension (builds a Launcher sub menu out of your documents folder for starting HackedUpReader)
• https://github.com/varnie/HackedUpReaderLauncher (directly start HackedUpReader) (not yet compatible with HackedUpReader 0.2.x, replace "/mnt/us/cr3xcb/bin/cr3" in menu.json with "/mnt/us/hackedupreader/bin/cr3")

Controls

When in the main screen, touching in the lower half of the screen opens the next page, touching in the upper half opens the previous page (customizable as of 0.2.0 in the settings "Page turning"). Touching the top bar will open the menu.

When in the menu, touching the top bar acts as 'Ok', touching the bottom bar on the left side will open the previous menu page, touching the right side will open the next menu page if there are any.

Touching numbered sections in the menu will select them or open any existing sub menu.

Known Bugs

Pressing the home button when a document is being shown in the standard Kindle reader, the home screen will be shown without any possibility to return to HackedUpReader. Current workaround is to restart the kindle.

Compilation

The source code can be found at https://github.com/bhaak/HackedUpReader

You need to set the correct values for your cross-compilation environment in tools/toolchain-arm-linux-gnueabi.cmake for the cmake variables CMAKE_C_COMPILER, CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER, CMAKE_STRIP and CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH.

In the following command, "/kindle_development" should be the same directory as CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH.

$ mkdir build; cd build
$ env PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=/kindle_development_dir/lib/pkgconfig \
   cmake \
    -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/kindle_development_dir \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/mnt/us/hackedupreader -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DGUI=CRGUI_XCB \
    -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=`pwd`/../tools/toolchain-arm-linux-gnueabi.cmake ..
$ make && make install

Who are you and why are you doing this?

I'm Patric Mueller [email protected] and I'm doing this because - contrary to Amazon who's manufacturing a great piece of hardware but is equipping it with inferior software - I like my e-books kerned, hyphenated and justified.

Contributing author: Sergey Alekseyev [email protected]