dslibris is a back-to-basics homebrew book reader for the DS. It began as a personal desire to not have to lug around Microsoft Reader on a PocketPC PDA. The idea is to create a comfortable and uncluttered reading experience.
sample book page
Features:
- antialiased, proportional text
- UTF-8, so both eastern and western languages are honored
- auto-scan for multiple XHTML files stored on your media
- power-save upon closing the DS lid
- restoration of latest book and page on restart
- brightness control on DS Lites
dslibris supports XHTML format files encoded in UTF-8. OpenOffice or HTML Tidy can be used to convert HTML to XHTML. See the book preparation posting on this blog for more.
This being DS homebrew, you’ll require a media card for your DS, and you will need to DLDI patch dslibris.nds for your DS media device. All of the dslibris files, including your .xhtml books, need to be in the root folder of your media.
Release downloads of dslibris, and source, are available on SourceForge. Also check there for release notes, known issues, and to post your own issues or feature requests. Here’s the help forum:
https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=739965
Hey, I’m opening up a homebrew site, with links and other stuff and eBooks in .xhtml. I was wondering if its ok to make a page dedicated to dslibris? The page on my site would have my homebrew video review of dslibris, along with a description for the app, a link to your site and I would give credit to you for making the program. Please tell me what you think!
Comment by Danny Chicago & New York City Kid — May 5, 2008 @ 5:04 am
I’ll give you the page so you can take a look at it, its a flash page not html.
Comment by Danny Chicago & New York City Kid — May 5, 2008 @ 5:05 am
Excellent work. Reading a well-formatted xhtml sideways feels like, and is convenient as reading a real book.
It is well worth the little effort of converting the files to xhtml.
Comment by Anonymous — May 7, 2008 @ 12:47 pm
How does Tom use OpenOffice to convert PDF’s? What program can even open a PDF with OOO? With Writer, it only outputs junk (You can create PDFs with OOO writer, but can’t open PDFs) . Also, there’s a bunch of ‘Freeware’ products out there that only let you convert the first 3 pdf pages. PDFtoHTML has no useful documentation for installing. ./make ./configure….blah, blah. Where’s the INSTALL.readme?
Yes, and then there’s the PDF picture…scan it with OCR, and then convert it to XHTML. Uh, Terrasect, SimpleOCR, blah.
Frustrating.
Comment by anon — May 22, 2008 @ 9:20 pm
I’m still not finding anything for converting pdf to xhtml. I’m on a windows machine that I use with my flash cart, but I do have an old powerbook with Tiger on it if need be. What can I use?
Comment by nick — June 6, 2008 @ 7:57 pm
Nick and Anon, i am skeptical that much PDF can be translated into a form that will work. The limitation is in the PDF format, which presupposes a certain page size when it is laid out and throws away paragraph information in the process.*
The exception may be tagged PDF, which can be reflowed. I have not done a full test of tagging a PDF and running pdftohtml on it. If somebody has some experience with tagged PDF, you could try and see what you can come up with and share it. OS X users can get pdftohtml via Fink as package … lessee … ‘poppler-bin’. Fedora users should look in apt. Surely a Windows version is out there too.
I’ll post to the SF list if I find out any solution for this.
* viewing PDF on a mobile browser or in Reader for WIndows CE/Mobile is illustrative. There’s a lot of panning and zooming involved.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — June 7, 2008 @ 2:02 am
also, see the ‘preparing books for reading’ posting for a note about “Convert Doc” which apparently does PDF to HTML.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — June 7, 2008 @ 2:22 am
I managed to find a copy of some books in lit format, then converted them with .. ConvertLit, then AbiWord into xhtml. It works now. I’d really love a more full-featured bookmark system.
Comment by nick — June 7, 2008 @ 1:56 pm
besides brandon’s MOON PROJECT site… does any one know a site where i can find other ebooks available to add onto my NDSL?
Thanks in advance! (^_^)
. the staCius .
Comment by . the staCius . — June 18, 2008 @ 9:47 am
Why can’t yu just read books straight fom a *.txt file?
Comment by Demonman — June 21, 2008 @ 10:01 pm
@demonman: 98% of the time, TXT format is preformatted for a certain screen width assuming some fixed width font. The assumed screen width is never the width of a DS screen. TXT content can’t be reflowed into a DS-sized screen with any reliability.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — June 23, 2008 @ 8:02 pm
Love your program! Converting books can be a pain sometimes (abiword has been my best success) but it’s worth it. I only ask that maybe you put a ‘forward/back 10 pages’ kind of feature (maybe up and down?)
Comment by BlueZoidberg — June 24, 2008 @ 6:58 am
@BlueZoidberg: fast page flipping is in the upcoming 1.3 release.
The project has multiple developers now, they monitor the bug and feature request lists on SourceForge, so folks can post their ideas there.
Thanks to everybody for their comments.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — June 24, 2008 @ 5:55 pm
I converted some books to .htm .. they didnt work. do they HAVE to be “xhtml” and what conversion prgram can i use and where to find it so i can do just that.
thanks in advance!
. the staCius .
Comment by . the staCius . — June 25, 2008 @ 1:15 am
Hi, I like your program alot, but no matter how many files I have on my sd card, I am unable to get more than 30 books to show up in my library. Am I doing something wrong? or is there some sort of limit?
Comment by tepkel — July 29, 2008 @ 10:55 am
Tepkel, it’s not you, it’s dslibris. There is a limit on number of books. We’re going to look at removing that restriction in a future 1.3 release.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — August 3, 2008 @ 6:41 pm
Stacius, check the wiki on SourceForge for the location of an HTML Tidy online service. Or google “html tidy web”.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — August 3, 2008 @ 6:46 pm
By the way, the Hebrew is all backwards. For example, in English it would look like “olleH dlrow” for “Hello world.”
Comment by Hangfromthefloor — August 7, 2008 @ 2:46 am
True. Arabic will be backwards too. And traditional japanese vertical layout isn’t supported. Hebrew and Arabic need to be put on the fix list.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — August 7, 2008 @ 7:11 am
Is it possible to launch dslibris from another directory but the root one?
(e.g. using it as moonshell for CycloDS Evolution?)
Comment by Raistlin — August 13, 2008 @ 2:28 pm
Cool Packages… i just got a question to ask.. where is the best place to get e-books to upload on my ds?
Comment by Elfen — August 13, 2008 @ 11:27 pm
My new website, kinda slow progress, but I’ll have tons of hit book in a dsdlibris compatible format. dsh-supplies.com, not open yet, I might change the url.
Comment by Daniel Cubero-Matos The Chicago & New York City Kid — August 31, 2008 @ 1:34 am
Thanks a lot for this great program, I use it all the time! I like how simple and convenient it is. I’ve seen it requested by other people, but I would LOVE it if dslibris was capable of recognizing more than 6 book files at a time–I’d love to be able to scroll through all the book files on my ds.
Thanks again!
Comment by Rose — October 2, 2008 @ 8:19 pm
@raistlin: Possibly, but I can’t test right now, no DS.
@rose: The latest version now supports a lot more than 6 books, there should be prev/next buttons on the browser screen.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — October 8, 2008 @ 11:30 pm
oh…I have the latest version, I just (stupidly) didn’t notice that option. Got it now, thank you!
Comment by Rose — October 17, 2008 @ 1:00 pm
Just another vote for .txt support here, as by the time I’ve gone through the inevitably problematic conversions of one of my e-books I’ve lost the desire to read it. DSLibris seems like a great piece of homebrew otherwise, I enjoyed the books I did have the patience to convert (& troubleshoot)! Would LOVE a good .txt reader instead of being stuck with Moonshell as the “best” (ha!).
Comment by Meghan — October 23, 2008 @ 12:02 am
Hello Ray, this awesome project has been in hiatus for a while. I hope it’s not been discontinued.
Comment by Pulstar — November 16, 2008 @ 5:19 pm
@Pulstar: hello again. It’s still barely alive, but I’ve been without my hardware and there have been performance issues recently due to code changes, yada yada.
Comment by Ray — November 19, 2008 @ 5:13 am
I’m glad to hear you’re still working on it at all
Homebrew for the DS has certainly slowed down but your app remains my #1 favourite. I’ve read dozens of ebooks using it. It already has most of the features people want but things like auto shut-off and 8-bit colour palettes would bring it closer to perfection! 
Best regards!
Comment by Pulstar — November 21, 2008 @ 11:21 pm
Can’t you somehow figure out how to use dslibris to read .lit files? All this extra bs I have to go though to figure this out simply isn’t worth it.
Comment by Annoyed — November 30, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
After I realized that Open Office converts files into xhtml pretty painlessly, DSLibris became one of my most-used apps! Are there continued plans for development or was 1.3 the last release that can be expected? Thanks again for letting me carry one less device!
Comment by Meghan — December 1, 2008 @ 1:55 am
@Meghan: great, one more point for OpenOffice!
@Annoyed: annoying, isn’t it? Microsoft provides tools for creating LIT files but not for decoding them, at least not for people without a special arrangement with them, perhaps.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — December 1, 2008 @ 1:58 am
:: Gives OpenOffice a shot :: (Disclaimer: I love the idea of your application, I’m just not as tech savy as many others are. I do try though.) <3 U
Comment by Annoyed — December 1, 2008 @ 2:52 am
[...] open-source dslibris looks interesting as well; it’s homebrew, so you’d need to load it on an appropriate [...]
Pingback by Ebooks coming to the Nintendo DS - Daily Buzz — December 11, 2008 @ 7:16 pm
I have a nintendo ds. How and where can i get this ebook reader for it? sounds great.
Comment by Sandra — December 12, 2008 @ 2:47 pm
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndslibris/
Comment by Pulstar — December 13, 2008 @ 11:58 pm
Now where do i get books from?
Comment by adi — December 16, 2008 @ 2:19 am
[...] astept replay… Homebrew care sa citeasca fisiere pdf direct nu exista. In schimb exista un ebook reader numit dslibris care citeste fisiere html care le poti obtine folosind un convertor pdf to html. [...]
Pingback by [Info] Clubul Nintendo DS - Page 56 - Computer Games Forum — December 27, 2008 @ 11:12 am
[...] dslibris – an eBook reader [...]
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