Book Reader
This is an Ebook Reader for the Zune HD!! Well, Sort-of. Something to remember, you MUST convert the original ebook into txt format for it to work with this program. It will also not come with a .ccgame so you must have some knowledge about how to deploy source code.
Instructions:
Basically the same as the other Zune Reader. First, convert your books to text files; if they are PDF, they won’t look very nice, because converting from PDF to txt leaves you with linebreaks everywhere. I have no fix for this, sorry.
Open up Visual C# and go to BookReader.sln. Drag this txt file to the “books” folder, which can be located in Content.Important: Select all the books and, at the bottom, change “Build Action” to “None” and “Copy to Output Directory” to “Copy if Newer”. If you don’t do this, it won’t build! Make sure that the Zune software is closed, your screen is locked and, of course, that your Zune is hooked up to your computer. Now, build by hitting F5. If the build succeeds, you’re done! If not, either ask why or figure it out by yourself!
Controls:
Choose Book Screen: To move up/down in the list of books, use the side buttons. To pick a book, press the book’s name.
Choose Line Screen: Type in some number. Try to make sure the number you put in is less than the number the book has. If you chose the wrong book (the name is shown above the line you’re gonna go to) then hit “Go Back.”
Loading Screen: Wait. This can take a long, long time, depending on the size of the book.
Reading Book: Use the up/down buttons to scroll. It will scroll by pages, and if you hold them down the pages will scroll faster after a bit of time. Use the back button to choose a different line, or a different book.
Some of known bugs:
The folder “BookReaderHD/scrolltest” is so named because that’s what the program was originally called and I can’t figure out how to rename the folder.
Some text encodings don’t work with the font. Some characters, i.e. “, – , ‘ etc, show up as *, so make sure your books are encoded in ASCII, not ISO-8859-1 or something else. The included short story, 2BR02B, is an example of this bug.
The “GameThumbnail.png” doesn’t seem to load; it automatically uses the default one.
DO NOT put commas or other strange characters into the book names. The deploy will fail with some unknown error message.
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7 Comments
where can you get free ebooks at?
you can get free ebooks on your local library’s web site
Is there anyway you could make this more easy. lol, i’m a noob when it comes to all of this, could you tell me more specificity how to do this…? i think it would be really cool to have this on my Zune HD!
LOVE THIS. A bit unpolished i admit, but handy none-the-less. I have no programming experience in C#/XNA but managed to figure out how to mod it (bigger text, changed background) after doing some googling. I hope someone can really make this app shine (better chapter management, scroll feature, etc). I’ll try to upload my Mod if anyone is interested (i also inverted the color scheme to increase battery life). Of course I’d be really interested to see what someone could do with the ZDK. Keeping my fingers crossed. Viva Zune HD!
How did you edit the program to change the font size and background?
currently this product is closed-source, but I will contact the author and see if he will release his source code. Buy you must have some c# experience to figure it out.
Can you guys please make a dictionary application? I’ve been looking everywhere online for a dictionary app for the zune but I can’t find any!!!! Please help!!!!