Back in July I thought I would spend a little money on a treat for myself. I didn’t need an new ereader (my old Aura was still working ok, albeit was a bit battered) but I wanted to check out the side handle on the Libra to see if it was more comfortable when reading at night.

A recap

I started back in 2009 with a Sony PRS-650. I used that until its battery died. Then I switched to a  Sony PRS T1  in 2013.

In 2014 I got a new Aura HD because I wanted a backlight (and was immediately a bit annoyed when I realized you needed to have a Kobo account just to use it to read books). I worked around that by having an account for the ereader that I never used and a separate account for any purchases I made and side loaded all my books through Calibre. This got replaced in 2017 with a new generation Aura after an unfortunate accident involving a suitcase and hard airport floor.

New reader

Which brings me to this year and my new Kobo Libra 2 with a colour screen. It’s not bad. I don’t much have use for the colour screen and the variable colour backlight is a bit annoying (more on that later). But over all I like the way it feels in the hand, like the fact the page turn buttons are back (haven’t seen them since the Sony) and am appreciative of the move to usb C.

Account registration

One of the bonuses was I looked into the whole “must have an account to use” idiocy again and found a hack:

1. Connect Libra Colour to PC.
2. Go to \.kobo\Kobo and find the Kobo eReader.conf file.
3. Open the file and add the line SideloadedMode=true under the [ApplicationPreferences] section.
4. Done! The device will now display the “My Books” tab straight away, and the online store will be disabled. You can re-enable everything by doing the same thing and adding SideloadedMode=false instead of true.

You lose the  main screen that shows the Books Reading etc but since I rarely used that its no great loss.

The downside is there are a number of “ghost” titles in the lists showing up under Author view that must have been something to do with promotions and I assume they would have been deleted int eh intial setup but annoyingly show up when I am browsing books on the ereader itself.

I have screwed around with editing the hidden KoboReader.sqlite file on the eredaer and while I can find the books in some tables, deleting them doesn’t seem to get rid of them. I imagine there are associated tables I need to clean as well but so far no joy unless I want to delete everything and start over. Still a possibility…

Battery life

I had/have a beef with the battery though. The Libra has a fancy dimming functionality. If you set bed time for, let’s say 11:00 pm, it will start slowly changing the colour of the backlight from cool (blue) to warm (orange) and dimming the screen for reading in the dark. I thought this was the cat’s meow.

But.

The battery life sucked. I mean I was recharging every 4 days! One night I hit the 10% battery life warning which used to mean I had several hours of charge left and it went out on me in less than 15 minutes. This was beyond unacceptable. I didn’t want colour at all, let alone if it was going to be such a huge battery suck. But googling yielded no solutions or even anyone else’s notice of the problem — I was starting to think maybe I got a dud ereader.

Then I started fiddling with settings and one night turned off the automatic dimmer and dialed the backlight down to 30% — which is a bit below my preferred level but workable. The next morning the battery indicator showed it was still full. Aaargh. I have left it that way and played with the colour and level and so far so good. It has only been a couple of days but the improvement is significant. I will keep on playing and see if I can nail down the exact battery-draining culprit, but so far it seems its just the timing function. Why Kobo would have such a ridiculous battery suck as a bart of the software is beyond me.

Happy?

I think so. I like the handle and page turn buttons. Now that the battery is better I have more faith in it (although I now keep my old Aura up to date and charged in case). It is a bit more bulk and doesn’t fit in a pocket anymore but that’s not an issue I care too much about except when my hands are full. And it is zippy! Interface things the Aura used to do badly like scrolling actually make sense now that the response is immediate instead of having to pause between touches.

But if I am feeling rich again I might finally break down and try a Boox or a Pocketbook. Still annoyed at Kobo? Why yes, how could you tell…? 🙂

The following is a blog post I originally wrote on behalf of Orca Book Publishers for the APLN (Accessible Publishing Learning Network) website. I had done a brief online Q&A on behalf of eBound talking about our Benetech certification and there were questions about my python workflow. So I tried to write it out, which was a good exercise in and of itself.

In 2022 Orca Book Publishers had a dozen accessible titles that had been remediated via programs with BooksBC and eBound as well as another group that had been created as mostly accessible epubs by outsourced ebook developers. When Orca made a commitment to creating accessibility ebooks the immediate goal was to pursue Benetech Certification with an eye to adopting a born accessible workflow and to start remediating backlist titles.

Orca has three main streams of books from an epub point of view: highly illustrated non-fiction, fiction with few or no images, and picture books. We started by remediating the fiction titles that were already mostly accessible and bringing them up to Benetech standards.

Concurrently we brought the non-fiction production in-house to begin to develop a functional accessible workflow. Non-fiction titles usually feature 80 plus illustrations and photographs, multiple sidebars, a glossary, index, and a bibliography.

In publishing circles a fair amount of time is spent bemoaning the shortcomings of InDesign as a platform for creating good epubs, let alone making accessible ones. With a complex design, you can spend a lot of time and effort prepping an InDesign file to export a “well-formed” file and still end up with a “messy” end result. Instead, Orca’s approach was to ignore InDesign as much as possible, export the bare necessities (styles, ToC, page markers etc.), clean out the junk in the epub it produces using a series of scripted search and replaces, and then rely on post-processing to produce well-formed, accessible epub in a more efficient manner.

To that end we started building two things: a comprehensive standard structure and its accompanying documentation for an Orca ebook, and a series of python scripts to apply that structure to epubs. These scripts needed to be robust enough to work with both new books and to remediate older titles that spanned everything from old epub2’s to mostly-accessible titles that didn’t quite meet Benetech standards.

Python in Epub production

Python was the obvious choice for these tasks. Python is a programming language suited for text and data manipulation that is highly extensible, with thousands of external libraries available, and has a focus on readability. It comes already installed with Mac OSX and is easily added to both Windows and Linux.

Python is easy to learn and fairly easy to use.  You can simply write a python script in a text file e.g.:

print('Enter your name:')
name = input()
print('Hello, ' + name)

Then save it as script.py and run it using a python interpreter. As a general rule writing and running python scripts from within an IDE (integrated development environment) like Visual Studio Code, a free IDE  created and maintained by Microsoft, makes this pretty simple. Using VS Code allows a developer to easily modify scripts and then run them from within the same application.

Regular Expressions

The other important part of the process and well worth learning as much as they can about — even if they don’t dive into python — is regular expressions (regex). This a system of patterns of that allow you to search and replace highly complex strings.

For instance if you wanted to replace all the <p>’s in a glossary with <li>’s:

<p class="glossary"><b>regular Expression</b>: is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text.</p>

You could search for:

<p class="glossary">(.*?)</p>

where the bits in parentheses are wildcards…and replace it with:

<li class="glossary">\1</li>.

For each occurrence found, the bit in the parentheses would be stored and then reinserted correctly in the new string.

Once you start to use regexes you’ll quickly get addicted to the power and flexibility and quite a few text editors (even InDesign via grep) support regular expressions.

Scripting Python

With these two tools you can write a fairly basic script that opens a folder (an uncompressed epub) and loops through to find a file named glossary.xhtml and replace the <p class="glossary"> tag and replace it with a <li> — or whatever else you might need. You can add more regexes to change the <title> to <title>Glossary</title>, add in the proper section epub:type’s and roles and more. Since InDesign tends to export fairly regular epub code once you clean out the junk, if you create a standard set of styles, it means you can easily clean and revise the whole file in a few key strokes.

Taking that one step further, if you ensure that the individual files in an epub are named according to their function e.g about-the-author.xhtml, copyright.xhtml, dedication.xhtml etc. you can easily have custom lists of search/replaces that are specific to each file, ensuring things like applying epub:types and aria-roles is done automatically or you could edit or change existing text with new standardized text in things like the .opf file.

If you build basic functions to perform search and replaces, then you can continually update and revise the list of things you want it to fix as you discover both InDesign and your designer’s quirks, things like moving spaces outside of spans or restructuring the headers. If you can conceptualize what you want to do, you can build a regex to do it and just add it to the list.

You can also build multiple scripts for different stages of the process or expand into automating other common tasks. For instance the Orca toolset currently has the following scripts:

• clean_indesign (cleans all the crud out and tidies up some basic structures),
• clean_epub (which replaces all the headers, adds a digital rights file, rewrites the opf file to our standard, standardizes the ToC and landmarks and more…),
• alt-text-extract (extracts image names, alt text and figcaptions to an excel spreadsheet),
• update_alt text (loads an excel spreadsheet that has alt text and, based on image file names, inserts it into the proper <img alt=""),
• run_glossary (which searches the glossary.xhtml and creates links to the glossed words in the text),
• extract_metadata (which loops through all the epubs in a folder and pulls the specified metadata e.g. pub date, modified date, a11y metadata, rights etc.),
• extract_cover _alt (loops through a folder of epubs and extracts the cover alt text into a excel spreadsheet),
• increment_pagenumber (some of our older epubs were made from pdfs that had different page numbering from the printed book, so this script goes through and bumps them by a specified increment)

You can see the InDesign cleaning script here: github.com/b-t-k/epub-python-scripts as a basic example. As we continue to clean up and modify the rest they will slowly be added to the repository.

Documentation

Concurrently to all this Orca maintains and continually revises a set of documents that records all the code and standards we have decided on. It is kept in a series of text files that automatically update a local website and it contains everything from the css solutions we use to specific lists of how ToC’s are presented, our standard schema, how we deal with long descriptions, lists of epub-types and aria roles and a record of pretty much any decision that is made regarding how Orca builds epubs. Because website is searchable, a quick search easily finds the answer to most questions.

Our Books

This type of automation has allowed us to produce accessible non-fiction titles in-house and in a reasonable time framework. Books like Open Science or Get Out and Vote! can be produced in a Benetech certifiable epub in just a few days even though they feature things like indexes, linked glossaries, long descriptions for charts and a lot of alt text that was written after the fact.

Producing an Accessible epub

The Future