owncloud-apps

This repo contains a few apps I made for Owncloud, mostly related to reading/publishing books and other digital publications.

Install

There are two ways to install apps from this repo:

• pull the repo and link/copy the desired apps to your Owncloud apps directory
• get tarballs (from dist/name_of_app-version.tar.gz) and extract them in your Owncloud apps directory

The first method gives you the latest, greatest and potentially buggiest versions. The second is therefore preferred for those who care about the stability of their Owncloud instance.

files_opds

The OPDS catalog app enables Owncloud users to publish a sub-tree of their personal filesystem as an OPDS feed. Since Owncloud currently has limited to no support for metadata, these are for now stored in a separate table. As of v0.3 OPDS catalog can extract all relevant metadata from EPUB documents; other document types will appear with sparse entries for now: only title (as in 'filename'), file size, cover image (where available), modification time and content links are provided.

The root feed links to a hierarchical navigation feed mirroring the directory structure as well as a 'personal bookshelf' containing all downloaded books in order (most recent download first). This 'personal bookshelf' will be empty (0 books) at first. Use the 'Browse catalog' link to download a book and it'll appear on the 'personal bookshelf'. Download another, and it will appear above the one you previously downloaded. This makes it possible to get at books you are in the process of reading from different devices, or to easily re-visit a book you downloaded earlier.

Once Owncloud starts supporting metadata in a more flexible way, this can be extended to include more faceted feeds (by tag, by author, by whatever...). For now, it works, albeit in a rather spartan fashion.

In the personal settings page there are options to enable/disable the feed (it is disabled by default), set the feed root directory, enter a list of extensions to which the feed should be limited (by default it publishes all files descending from the feed root) and clear the personal bookshelf.

The admin settings page contains options to change file preview preferences (which should probably be in core or in a separate app as this changes a system-wide setting ('enabledPreviewProviders')). Also on the admin settings page is an option to change the cover image and thumbnail dimensions.

As it stands now, this is all the app does. It does not offer any specific way to manage publications, other than designating a root directory to serve them from. Once Owncloud starts supporting more extensive metadata I might reconsider the feature set. For now, I'd rather keep it simple as I don't fancy putting a lot of work (or CPU cycles) into managing my rather extensive collection of documents based on an ephemeral data store.

The OPDS feed is disabled when the app is installed, enable it in the personal settings page under the header 'OPDS'.

To connect to the OPDS feed, point your OPDS client at the app URL:

 https://example.com/path/to/owncloud/index.php/apps/files_opds/

If all goes well, the client should ask for a username and password - enter your Owncloud credentials here (and make sure you use HTTPS!).

The feed has been tested on these clients:

• FBReader on Android: OK
• Aldiko on Android: OK
• CoolReader on Android: buggy (CoolReader browser adds an extraneous '/' to the URL, probably related to this bug: http://sourceforge.net/p/crengine/bugs/267/)
• KyBook on iOS: OK
• Marvin on iOS: OK
• eBook Search on iOS: browsing works, downloading does not (401 error, 'Unauthorised')
• Gecko-based browsers: OK, feed can be browsed and books can be downloaded without additional software.

files_reader

Reader is an ebook reader based on a pure javascript epub renderer. It only works for books formatted according to the epub standard.

Using the futurepress epub.js renderer it provides near-native looks, especially when used full-screen. Turn pages by pressing the left/right hand side of the screen/window or using the cursor keys (if you have those), use the sidebar to browse through chapters or bookmarks and add annotations.

Reader has a night mode (toggled by clicking or pressing the book title/author on top of the viewer) to read in the dark without waking up the neighbours. This is obviously most effective when used full-screen. The colours used for night mode are configurable in the Settings dialog.

Also in Settings you'll find the option to use ignore any internal formatting in the book by forcing a given font style and size.

Reader is available at the App repo: https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php/Reader+(ebook+reader)