For the Those with Literary Inclinations

I like reading fiction and I miss writing fiction myself. There’s nothing like a good book to keep me up all night. When the story’s really gripping, I can’t help myself. That’s why I prefer having an ebook reader on my DS aside from actual books.

For the e-book worms

If you have an e-book reader, you have an application you might want to consider. Calibre is an open source application made for those who love reading e-books. This e-book management system can support a lot of e-book formats such as EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, PDB, PML, RB, PDF and TXT as output formats. For input it supports CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TXT. This means that users have more formats possible for them to read and aside from that, conversion is possible. If I have LIT files, I could convert them to something else I could read in my DS. (LIT to TXT will be a good example, I think. Too bad there’s none for XHTML so I’d still have to use Tidy to do the work for me.)

Another thing about Calibre is its support for its users to add information about the ebooks through a ‘jacket’ for convenience.

If you need an e-book reader, well, Calibre has one too. You could verify if the conversion of your input files to your specified output files went well.

A book, my old phone and my old DS Lite. What do they have in common? They all feed my reading habit. There are times Ioad e-books on my phone and DS.

And for the writers…

And then there’s Writer’s Cafe. If you want your own ‘writing environment’ it seems that it’s a useful application. You can keep notes, get writing prompts, get tips, check the dictionary, etc. You could even keep a journal, write down your storylines, etc.

When you’re writing a story (or want to start one) sometimes you wonder if you’d be able to write anything at all. Sometimes you need to ask someone for help on names, locations, other details that matters when making a character. You could actually generate names in Writer’s Cafe. Amusing, right? But it’s true. It’s hard to come up with names every once in a while and it’s nice to have something supply you with one.

You could even have a place to stick pictures, etc. so you have references. It’s like having a board to play around with but it’s just on your computer.

I’d love to use Writer’s Cafe when I want to practice writing fiction again. It’s a nifty tool as well as an interesting environment that would really let me focus on writing and all related activities to my writing as well.