Open E-books: A Tour of Plucker

So what's Plucker? Basically, it's a great way to carry those books, documents, daily newspapers, and all those have-to-be-read Web pages around with you in your pocket!

Or: Plucker is the name of a project that is building an open-source, open-format hypertext e-book system. As of January, 2001, the system consists of a distiller program that creates e-books in the Plucker format, and a viewer for those e-books that runs on the Palm platform. The distiller, which is known to run on Windows, Unix (Linux, Solaris, and many others), and OS/2 (and will probably run on other platforms, because it's written in a widely ported scripting language called Python), takes any text document, or a document in the Open Ebook XML format, or any set of HTML web pages, and creates a e-book from them. This e-book can then be synchronized to your Palm device, and read at your leisure.

Read? Read how? Well, let's take a tour...

When you tap on the Plucker icon on your Palm,

you will always see the e-book you were last reading, which in this case happens to be Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

If you tap on the small folder in the toolbar at the top of the screen, you will get to the database manager, which is just a list of all the Plucker e-books currently installed on your Palm. (The e-books are in the form of PalmOS databases, so they are also sometimes referred to as 'databases'.) Here's what that looks like:

You'll note that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has a highlighted icon next to it. That indicates that it is the current e-book. This icon is also the menu pop-up; if you tap it, you'll see a menu of actions that can be taken on that e-book:

If we Open Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we see the title page:

The toolbar at the top of the page gives you access to some functionality. The leftmost icon on the toolbar brings up the menubar; the next icon, the small folder, takes us to the database manager, as we've seen already.

The other icons are about the e-book that we are reading. Plucker assumes that each e-book can be a hypertext web, so some of them are about navigating the web, while others are just about the current page. For instance, the percentage value is the amount of the current page of the e-book that we've seen already. The little book with a 'b' in it allows you to set or goto bookmarks, anywhere in the e-book. The left side of the spectacles provides a search command, either in the current page or all pages of the e-book, while the right side is 'find again'. The left arrow takes you back to the page that you came from, the small house icon takes you to the root of the e-book, and the rightmost arrow takes you forward again to the page that you've just returned from, if any (whew! clear?).

Let's scroll down to the table of contents, using the scrolling rocker switch at the bottom of the Palm:

The underlined passages are links, as you would find in a Web browser. If you click on them, you are taken to the page the link points to. So let's click on chapter 1:

You can scroll either with the rocker switch, or with the scrollbar (you can tap on it, or you can drag the 'elevator'), or you can configure the Plucker viewer to respond to a tap on the screen as a scrolling action. So if we scroll down a bit, we find the White Rabbit:

To give ourselves a bit more room, we could turn off the toolbar at the top of the screen. We tap on the menubar icon, then pull down the View menu:

and select No Toolbar, which gives us

We can also disable the scrollbar, by going to the Preferences panel:

With the scrollbar turned off, we have the most screen space available:

Let's turn them both back on, and look at a different e-book.

One of Plucker's strengths is that it can serve as an off-line HTML reader. You can take any Web page, and turn it into a Plucker e-book. You can decide whether pages pointed to by that page will be included or not, and if so, to what 'depth'. This makes it very useful for making e-books out of web documents that are already in hypertext form. The HTML specification is a good example. This is a single logical e-book, composed of a number of web pages on the World Wide Web Consortium website. In Plucker format it's a very powerful reference tool:

Suppose we want to look up something about how color is specified in an HTML document. By clicking on the 'Table of Contents' link, we get to

Then click on section 6, 'Basic HTML Data Types', and we have

Then we click on section 6.5, 'Colors', and we see

Sometimes the link on a page points to another page that isn't included in the Plucker form of the document. In that case, the URL of the link is still available. For those of us who use link pages, that is, a web page that contains lots of links to various other places, that makes Plucker a handy way to carry around our URLs. For instance, here's part of my top-level link page:

The nice thing about this is that even though I don't have the pages that the various links point to, I still have the URLs. This means that I can still pass a URL on to someone, from my Palm. Let's see how this works. Let's say I want to find out the URL for 'Pocket MapBlast'. I click on the Pocket MapBlast link, and get the following:

At this point, I can read the URL off to someone, or copy it to the clipboard, paste it into a memo, and beam it to another Palm.

When I return to the links page, the underlining of the link that I just followed has changed to a series of dots. This indicates that the link has been followed at least once. Look at the link for Pocket Mapblast here:

You can see that the link has changed to a 'lighter' texture.

After you've read this far, you'd probably like to load up your Palm with Plucker and try it out. Here's a small zip file containing just the 1.0 Palm viewer and a couple of sample e-books. First, install the two .prc files on your Palm. Then, install the two .pdb files on your Palm (each contains an e-book). Then tap on the Plucker icon in the Launcher, and read away!

Or, you can read the Plucker 1.0 User's Guide.

Or, you can look over the Plucker database format specification.

Or, you could take a look at the Plucker homepage, which is still pretty developer-oriented. (You do know how to check out a CVS tree and cross-compile for the Palm, don't you? :-)

Or, you could go to your favorite e-book publisher and ask when their e-books will be available in Plucker format :-).