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Library.nu takedown // also, ramblings about PDF readers

Started by Triple Zero, April 21, 2012, 09:16:03 PM

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Triple Zero

As some of you undoubtedly must have noticed, Library.nu is no more.

from the site maintainer:

QuoteIn short what happened?

I am not able to comment and put my side of the story at this time (not that I don't want to), you could read this excellent piece in meantime, most of the other articles in the media contain unhealthy amounts of speculation, and are not based on facts and reality.

Is library.nu coming back?

No! The site, its database and everything else related to the old library.nu was deleted. It's gone, dead, RIP.

What is this site about? how to help?

The old site never strongly solicited help from the users,
but this time you can help me with my HUGE legal expenses by simply purchasing books and ebooks from Amazon via this site (helping authors too!).
If you have any other ideas or questions on how to help then contact me.
And if you are an author I would be very happy to hear from you...

So that article is http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html seems quite an interesting read.

On a barely related subject. Some time ago I discussed the possibility of having a custom personal search engine produced from your collection of ebooks. You know, those gigabytes of PDFs that you are never going to manage to read even if you'd be stranded on a desert island for 5 years.

Well I've been collecting some PDF extraction tools left and right but I've not really coded anything yet.

However, today I went on a little search for alternative PDF readers:

- Acrobat is a piece of bloatware that has had WAY too many rather severe exploits (almost all due to the fact they want to make PDFs like websites with DRM, scripting, net access, code execution, 3D OpenGL bullshit, instead of just, you know, a Portable Document Format).
- The (afaik) most well-known alternative, FoxIt Reader, is a commercial piece of software. I prefer Open Source/Free software. But more importantly, FoxIt is not very lean when it comes to bloat either. Not as huge as Acrobat but it does have quite a few of these scripting and "interactive" features that nobody ever asked for in a PDF.

Fortunately there are also a few good alternatives:

- "Sumatra PDF is a free PDF, eBook (MOBI), XPS, DjVu, CHM, Comic Book (CBZ and CBR) reader for Windows. Sumatra PDF is small, portable and starts up very fast. Simplicity of the user interface has a high priority". A few years back I tried Sumatra and I was a bit put off by the shitty user interface. I forgot what exactly, but there were a few rough edges in the way you went from one page to the next. But today I installed it again and they've had a LOT of development activity since what I guess must have been 2009, like 10 new releases or so. Anyway, to sum it up: Sumatra is now pleasant to use and it's exactly what you'd expect of a PDF reader, nothing more, nothing less. Can really recommend!

- Evince is a PDF reader from the Gnome project (a popular Linux desktop environment/GUI, default desktop interface for Ubuntu in all but the latest version). When I got back on Windows from a few years of using Linux (with Gnome), I often wondered why Windows couldn't have a simple PDF+PostScript reader that just works. Well, it turns out you actually can! It's cross platform and you can just download and install it for free. The great thing about Evince is that it also supports PostScript (PS) files. If you read a lot of papers from the exact sciences, you're bound to come across PS documents every once in a while. Good PS readers for Windows are far and few between (even though PS is a subset of PDF so I don't quite get why not every PDF reader also supports PS), and the nice thing is that Evince works pretty well, no bullshit not too many options, and is completely free and open source. Evince is about 31MB to download so not as tiny as Sumatra (4MB), but still not bad, given it comes with PostScript support. I personally like the UI of Sumatra slightly better, so I'm keeping both.

One other, quite different thing I came across is a tool called Qiqqa. I thought it was just another PDF reader, but it's more like a manager kind of thing that keeps track of all your PDFs (and probably a few other formats as well), kind of in a similar sense that many desktop MP3 player programs want to create a "library" of your music files.

Usually this sort of bullshit results in a very immediate trip to /dev/null uninstall world. But Qiqqa promised me a full-text search of my PDFs! Currently it's still scanning my collection (which isn't even everything, just 4GB, the rest is on my external HD) and been doing so for the past two hours. So expect to let it run for a night or so. Fortunately it seems to have a feature that allows you to pause the scanning, although I haven't seen the need yet for doing so because it's not slowing down my machine really. My estimate says it needs about 1h20m before it's finished.

It's also got a lot of features to deal with creating proper citations and references and BibTeX codes, annotations and things like that. In case you're writing a PHD thesis--especially in an exact science when you're using LaTeX anyhow--that could be useful. Kai once mentioned he uses a tool called Zotero to manage those kinds of things. Apparently Qiqqa is able to import documents from Zotero (and a couple of other similar tools). I have no idea about how useful these features are btw.

Apart from that Qiqqa is a commercial "freemium" application. And apparently they really want you to register an account for online syncing and other bull. I haven't done this yet. But if you do, you get one day of "premium" access for every person you get to click on your special "affiliate" code link.

Also Qiqqa is quite bloated (well, the UI feels kinda slow), so if the PDF full-text search isn't excellent I'm dumping it.
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Cain

Interesting.  I'll admit to using Foxit on my laptop, but mainly because earlier versions were less bloaty and it came with multiple tabs and a search function, the two things you really need when you're using ebooks to search for things and write essays.  Neither of these options seem to support tabbed viewing, so for now, I'll stick to my non-updated version of Foxit.

As for library.nu...sad, very sad indeed.

Kai

Sad indeed. Poor Gigapedia, I knew it, Horatio. That article is great, it highlights that the users were students and scholars, a far cry from the stereotype that news media likes to paint of people who use such sites.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

Triple Zero

Bit of an update on Qiqqa: turns out that given the task of indexing my 4GB of PDFs, it was nowhere near "almost done" :) It's been crunching on them for the better part of today as well and I have no idea when it was going to finish but I stopped it, and I'm uninstalling it.
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Kai

Quote from: Triple Zero on April 23, 2012, 12:21:06 AM
Bit of an update on Qiqqa: turns out that given the task of indexing my 4GB of PDFs, it was nowhere near "almost done" :) It's been crunching on them for the better part of today as well and I have no idea when it was going to finish but I stopped it, and I'm uninstalling it.

It might actually just be easier (yet more time consuming) to use Zotero.
In addition, I find a really good file label system works wonders. Every single one of my pdfs gets a label like the following.

Anonymous_1900_Amazing_Stuff

I.E.

Authorlastname_Yearpublished_Title_Parts_Telegraphic_Style

In addition to be easy to search, it also means your files are always alphabetic by author.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

hirley0

Quote from: ZL 'Kai' Burington, M.S. on April 23, 2012, 02:33:18 AM

arts_Telegraphic_Style

always alphabetic by author.

NAVY knifeYE? of course Maybe _Style translates to PDF
Jest guessing: yeah i know (hair stands on end} OR {gets Kinky) its the
tele K component Magnified by EARTHS core, i have no control
My guess is never ever BAKE  in a micro wave {except for Potatoes)
and turn those 3 time  so each side is up for 1 Min (top bottom Left Right}
i now return you frizzies to the natural state | in need of conVection OvEven

Triple Zero

Kai, yes okay, except my collection isn't actually for academic research but more collected along the lines of "hey that looks cool, click, save." :) Some of it I actually end up reading (most of the scientific papers on various ML and comp.sci algorithms) and some of them probably never (complete books, mostly). What I want the full-text search capability for is not because I need help locating the paper I'm looking for (they're ordered by topic, not perfect but it works for now), but rather for finding papers or chapters in books that I don't know (yet) I'm looking for.

My dream would be, hacking a custom search page that queries results from DuckDuckGo (or Google, for that matter), and locally combines those results with results from a full text search in my local PDF collection (and why not add a full text search of local HTML-only copies of my whole bookmarks file for good measure). That way I would serendipitously discover forgotten books (and forgotten bookmarked resource sites) whenever I search the web for something I want to know.

Basically, what I want is the stuff that Google/G+ is pushing on everybody with their "personalized results", except that I don't see why my own computer can't search that stuff locally (really it's not that much text compared to what a web search engine needs to dig through), so I don't need to give my data to Google, but also so that I'm actually in control of what it searches and how it searches*.


*) Regular ?q="quoted phrase"+AND+keyword search, please. no milk. Ordered by retardedly simple adjustable weighted ranking algo. Remember when MSN Live Search had sliders to adjust its rankings? No? Well I do, and Bing doesn't! :argh!:
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Kai

Quote from: Triple Zero on April 23, 2012, 05:42:02 PM
Kai, yes okay, except my collection isn't actually for academic research but more collected along the lines of "hey that looks cool, click, save." :) Some of it I actually end up reading (most of the scientific papers on various ML and comp.sci algorithms) and some of them probably never (complete books, mostly). What I want the full-text search capability for is not because I need help locating the paper I'm looking for (they're ordered by topic, not perfect but it works for now), but rather for finding papers or chapters in books that I don't know (yet) I'm looking for.

My dream would be, hacking a custom search page that queries results from DuckDuckGo (or Google, for that matter), and locally combines those results with results from a full text search in my local PDF collection (and why not add a full text search of local HTML-only copies of my whole bookmarks file for good measure). That way I would serendipitously discover forgotten books (and forgotten bookmarked resource sites) whenever I search the web for something I want to know.

Basically, what I want is the stuff that Google/G+ is pushing on everybody with their "personalized results", except that I don't see why my own computer can't search that stuff locally (really it's not that much text compared to what a web search engine needs to dig through), so I don't need to give my data to Google, but also so that I'm actually in control of what it searches and how it searches*.


*) Regular ?q="quoted phrase"+AND+keyword search, please. no milk. Ordered by retardedly simple adjustable weighted ranking algo. Remember when MSN Live Search had sliders to adjust its rankings? No? Well I do, and Bing doesn't! :argh!:

Sounds complicated.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

Kai

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
Chanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish