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
Brandon at Moon Books will be hosting downloads of dslibris.
http://moonbooks.net
Comment by Ray Haleblian — September 19, 2007 @ 1:56 am
Any chance of a source release?
Comment by Wiitendo64DS — September 20, 2007 @ 5:11 am
the idea has come up – it’s certainly possible after I do some necessary refactoring and talk with some other developers about possible collaboration.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — September 20, 2007 @ 4:38 pm
See the post ‘Preparing HTML and XHTML books for reading in dslibris’ for more on book preparation.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — September 24, 2007 @ 1:40 pm
Just wondering if you could make it possible to adjust the font size? The default size is much too small for my eyes and it makes reading very straining and difficult. Apart from that, great application!
I also noticed that it’s possible to substitute a different TTF font by copying and then renaming the filename to dslibris.ttf — this is very handy.
Comment by Gerry Quach — October 1, 2007 @ 5:35 am
Gerry, in the next release I’ll try to put in a method for specifying a different font size in the prefs file.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — October 1, 2007 @ 6:03 am
Thanks Ray, good to hear — I can hardly wait!
Comment by Gerry Quach — October 1, 2007 @ 1:50 pm
Thanks Ray for this excellent app. I’d like to echo Gerry’s request for different font sizes.
Comment by Pulstar — October 5, 2007 @ 6:03 pm
0.2.5 is released and supports setting a different font size. The default size is 10.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ndslibris
See the release notes for instructions.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — October 6, 2007 @ 6:21 pm
Thank you for listening to our feedback! But the archive is corrupt it seems, and I’ve tried more than one mirror.
Comment by Pulstar — October 7, 2007 @ 9:20 am
Thanks for updating the archive
Now I’m clueless as to how to resize the font, and pressing Start yields a fatal error on my R4DS!
Comment by Pulstar — October 7, 2007 @ 7:17 pm
OOPS – START is very broken, don’t press it! it is a reboot function that does not work. I’ll turn it off.
I saw your response on gbadev so you know what to do for font size control – edit the prefs in dslibris.xml. more explanation can be found in the [User Guide] inside dslibris, or in the Sourceforge release notes for this version.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — October 8, 2007 @ 4:29 pm
Cool app, works very good on my card.
It is possible to include support for left-handed people (with rotating both screens by 180 degrees, like in Nintendo’s Brain Age)?
Comment by jackman — November 20, 2007 @ 8:48 pm
hi jackman,
well there’s an interesting question. i asked myself, “which orientation is left-handed”? turns out both are – and neither are. the current setup puts the D-pad at the bottom for your thumb. otherwise there’s the shoulder buttons, which actually work for either hand currently, using the thumb or index finger to page forward.
Comment by ray — November 27, 2007 @ 7:39 am
OK, but you have to include support for rotating the screens, if you include functionality for the touch screen, because with the current orientation they block the upper screen with their left hand when using the touch screen.
Comment by jackman — November 28, 2007 @ 1:57 pm
when start the app up it says startup console [ok] media filesystem [ok] typesetter [fail]
what do i do to fix that
Comment by Daniel — December 26, 2007 @ 3:36 am
Works on my R4
Just put everything in the root directory and don’t forget to DLDI patch it!
BTW, the library needs to handle more than 7 books.
MAXBOOKS 7?
Thanks
Dude (yes that is my real name!)
Comment by Dude — December 31, 2007 @ 2:53 pm
Be nice of you to give the source considering you are using sourceforge
Comment by echo — January 2, 2008 @ 10:30 pm
Echo, the source is up on sourceforge, see the CVS menu for info.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — January 4, 2008 @ 1:03 am
It’s too bad that you can’t store the support files in a directory other than the root.
I’d also like to be able to navigate folders rather than to have all the xhtml files dumped into one directory.
Comment by Nobody — January 6, 2008 @ 8:05 pm
Just curious, is there any way that, in future releases, you could extend the compatibility of this app beyond only XHTML files? Most of the eBooks I have are in other formats like .lit, .chm, and .pdf.
It would be greatly appreciated!
Comment by Anonymous — January 11, 2008 @ 5:02 pm
It’s
It won’t display the pictures embebbed with the code, correct?
Comment by Waldemar — January 13, 2008 @ 6:18 pm
it’s an amazing homebrew, better than reading on PALM! Congratulations!
Comment by Waldemar — January 13, 2008 @ 6:19 pm
Very nice Reader, I took it as my favourite immediately.
However, i found a little mistake:
If there are longer words at end of lines, the program has Problems with seperating right. Sometimes words are cut in the middle, other times the rest of the words disappears.
The same with too long words without space, the program doesn’t split them and information is lost
Examples:
a) This is an examp
le of the mistak //This is an example of the mistake
b) or-if-there-are- //or-if-there-are-longer-lines-they-disappear
Comment by darkcombat — January 13, 2008 @ 8:14 pm
Waldemar, yes, images are not supported but
are on my wishlist.
Darkcombat, the long line breaking problem
should be fixed in the latest release, pls
send me an example file if not. the problem
with some words breaking in the middle is
still there AFAIK.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — January 14, 2008 @ 12:22 am
[...] suport multillenguatge i ha estat programat per Ray Haleblian. Es pot llegir més informació a la pàgina oficial de presentació, en alguns fils de fòrums que parlen del tema o en diferents pàgines d’anàlisi [...]
Pingback by SomGNU » Blog Archive » Programari lliure en pantalla doble — January 21, 2008 @ 4:17 pm
Hello Ray, I see DSLibris’ up to version 1.0.3 and it’s getting better with each release. However, speaking to a friend of mine she suggested adding a new colour scheme, in her words “black text on an off-white, like cream is usually ok, emulates a real book, less eye strain”. Is that at all possible?
Thanks again for DSLibris and the many hours of cozy reading
Comment by Pulstar — January 21, 2008 @ 11:37 pm
To Anonymous (post 21). You can convert your books to xhtml. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftohtml/ is a program to convert pdf files to html (I’ve not tried it yet), and http://www.convertlit.com/download.php converts .lit files to hml (it also produces other files which can be ignored).
Comment by Lou — January 23, 2008 @ 8:52 am
So do I just install in on my nintendo DS? and how do I go about doing that?
Comment by Smith — February 17, 2008 @ 12:30 am
hi, I have tried to get this to work with my CyloDS Evolution card but when I load the dslibris.nds file I get a white screen on the bottom screen and a red one at the top. Both blank. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?
Comment by astrogirl — February 21, 2008 @ 11:29 pm
smith, there are a few pages out there about running homebrew, you can google for ‘ds homebrew’ or ‘dldi’.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — February 23, 2008 @ 4:35 pm
astrogirl, if you’re running an older version, that probably means the font file can’t be found. make sure you copy dslibris.ttf to the root of your media card (not into a folder).
Comment by Ray Haleblian — February 23, 2008 @ 4:51 pm
Pulstar, an off-white bg option is a good idea. I will look at this when I am in that section of code next.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — February 23, 2008 @ 6:41 pm
This is a great app and very promising. Big thanks for your hard work!
I wonder if you’d consider removing, or significantly reducing, the size of the margins? It seems that around 20% of the screen space is currently left blank in the margins. The extra width would accommodate more characters per line, and the longer lines would be a little bit more comfortable on the eye. Need to squeeze every available bit out of the DS’s limited screen real-estate!
Comment by Rich P — February 29, 2008 @ 3:51 pm
Rich, good point. I’ll add this to the feature request list on Sourceforge.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — March 1, 2008 @ 4:24 pm
I find DSlibris as a good application for e-book reading and i’ve downloaded it’s current version..
But i have problems launching it it says on the screen Guru Meditation Error the screen turns red with lots of numbers and letters..
Can you help me regarding this problem, it would be a big help, and since i’ve downloaded the moonbookspack in moonbooks.net it would be a waste if i could not launch it..
Any advice or help will be appreciated..hehe
Comment by Jc Gomez — March 4, 2008 @ 11:47 am
I forgot I’m using DSTT with its current firmware version..
thanks again..
Comment by Jc Gomez — March 4, 2008 @ 11:56 am
Great little program, Thanks so much, I’m so pleased with myself. I followed all the advice I read from the good people here and got it running on my R4DS!! All I need to do is convert some books from .txt to .xhtml!!! great!!!
Comment by Ess.uk — March 10, 2008 @ 8:43 pm
Perhaps having a configuration screen where people could do all these little tweaks themselves would be a cool idea. Background color, text color, margins, backlight level, etc.
Also on my wish list is an option to invert the l/r buttons (I hold my DS from the bottom in my left hand, and I mostly use the next page function when I’m reading so having next page be L would be nice. Right under the thumb.)
Comment by cylver — March 14, 2008 @ 8:21 pm
After much fiddling around trying to convert my PDFs to XHTML, I think that the easiest way is to use Open Office. Quick and easy.
Comment by Tom — April 16, 2008 @ 1:30 pm
First of all, thank you for the hard work!
I got the last stable version (1.0.4) from Sourceforge (the current one, 1.2.143, crashes when trying to navigate the book menu) and couldn’t find any dslibris.xml file so I can edit the prefs in, as you suggested before…
Can I still change the size of the default font in the 1.0.4. version ?
Comment by Eddie — April 26, 2008 @ 3:01 pm
Eddie, 1.0.4 should allow you to edit the ’size’ attribute in the font element of the dslibris.xml prefs file.
If you’re willing to experiment, try putting just one book, or leave out all but the included quickstart book, and see if it still crashes.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — April 27, 2008 @ 8:29 pm
The sourceforge site has a place where you can post issues (bugs) or feature requests.
There’s also a mailing list you can subscribe to where people are discussing using dslibris.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — April 27, 2008 @ 8:29 pm
Hi Ray, sorry to bother you with this but I’m really excited to use DSlibris. Unfortunately I’m getting a:
console [OK]
filesystem [fail]
for both versions 1.0 and 2.3 downloaded from moonbooks. The sourcefourge link doesn’t seem to be working at the moment.
For v2.0 I get this:
console [OK]
filesystem [fail]
typesetter [fail
book library [fail]
I’m using an m3ds simply. Any ideas what’s going wrong?
Comment by Ryan — April 30, 2008 @ 10:11 am
@Ryan: ooh, Brandon interpreted the version numbering i was using, so those versions are quite old, they are actually 0.1.0 and 0.2.0 respectively.
The current version is 1.2.143 and is available on sourceforge (do search). See the release notes for how files get set up. The messages you got before now get written to a log file called ‘dslibris.log’.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — April 30, 2008 @ 4:41 pm
Ryan, also if you could subscribe to the mailing list we can talk further to get dslibris to work for you.
I’ll also check the sourceforge link, I’ve had problems with the .zip files being broken.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — April 30, 2008 @ 4:44 pm
The .zip looks ok and I can reach sourceforge at the moment.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — April 30, 2008 @ 4:47 pm
JC, if you’re still trying to get dslibris to work, subscribe to the mailing list on sourceforge and we can troubleshoot.
Comment by Ray Haleblian — April 30, 2008 @ 4:48 pm
Wow, absolutely awesome. I checked out the wiki and the guides and did all the dldi patching and hey presto my DS is an ebook reader! I woud kiss your feet if I could. and the community is awesome as well, thanks to keishava for reformatting the gutenberg books to xhtml!
Hey Ray if you ever want to jazz up the UI a bit, I’d be glad to help. I’m currently working as an artist for a small DS game and would like to offer you my services as a UI/graphic designer. If you’re interested hit me up at ryan.sumo@gmail.com. Thanks again for an excellent product.
Comment by Ryan — May 1, 2008 @ 3:37 am
Thanks Ryan, i’ll include you in future discussion about UI design.
Comment by Ray — May 1, 2008 @ 4:51 pm