eBook Library 6.1.0 review
DownloadeBook Library was created to help you practice speed reading at speeds from 50 to 1500 words per minute using plain text Unicode (UTF-8) encoded files.
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eBook Library was created to help you practice speed reading at speeds from 50 to 1500 words per minute using plain text Unicode (UTF-8) encoded files.
There are several ways to load an eBook into eBook Library. The eBook Library menu has three menu picks, one to help you find free eBooks, one to load an eBook from your eBookshelf and one to save an eBook file to your eBookshelf. You may also click on the "Choose New Source" button and navigate to a text file. You can pause and continue at any time. For example, you might start an eBook and decide to finish later. If you wish to continue reading the last text source used, click on the "Use Last Source" button (instead of the "Choose New Source" button) and the text will appear almost instantaneously, ready to start reading. eBook Library will remember the line at which you stopped and display this info when you start a new session. Your speed settings are saved between sessions. You can start reading at the beginning or at any line. You can use automatic or manual scrolling.
Displayed above, the user has selected the low end of the medium range. The speed is set for approximately 400 wpm. The full text can be seen very dimly in the background. As you can see, coding prevents breaking of words. The line width is a compromise between a normal newspaper column and a wide newspaper column. Each line is broken into two snapshots; text is displayed one snapshot at a time. Above, you see the right snapshot on the 628th line of a 3336 line text. Automatic scrolling is selected. The user stopped reading the last source text at line 611. If checked, the box at the top right of the window further dims the background text (useful for users who project the display on a large screen and the background text is more obvious). This setting is saved between sessions.
When eBook Library is launched the first time, a new folder named "eBookshelf" is placed in the Users/Documents folder. This folder is used thereafter to store eBooks. Above is a snapshot of an eBookshelf folder containing ebook texts.
eBook Library Parsing: A new source file has many (hundreds to tens of thousands) characters that must be removed (tabs, carriage returns, line feeds, and extra spaces) before the reading can begin. The user is kept aware of the parsing progress being made. This process usually takes approximately two minutes for a 200 KB file on a 1 GHz G4 but the time depends on the file formatting. Larger files take longer; a 400 KB file takes much longer than twice the time for a 200 KB file. eBook Library tries to prevent breaking words but sometimes there are long strings of characters (words separated by dashes, etc.) that look like one single word. This long string problem is handled automatically. Parsing and building of rows (lines) is handled on a single pass; this approach is significantly faster than older approaches.
Steps to make a text source file:
* Find the text (eBook or otherwise) you want to read. Restrict your selections to plain text, us-ascii encoding (not iso-8859-1) and no compression. This is important!
* Copy just the desired text.
* Paste into a new TextEdit (or equivalent) file.
* Select TextEdit menu pick Format > Make Plain Text.
* Save As Unicode (UTC-8) file with ".txt" suffix.
* Use this file as the eBook Library text source file.
What's New:
this version is Universal Binary
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